Comparison of Magnetic Levitation Systems Using Ring-Shaped Permanent Magnets

Recently, there has been a growing interest in magnetic levitation. In respect to these expectations, lots of applications using magnetic levitation are developed. In this paper, the reference model, which is consisted of four electromagnets and permanent magnets, is replaced with two type of magnetic levitation systems by using only permanent magnets: the attraction-based levitation and the repulsion-based levitation. Two types of magnetic levitation system are analyzed using finite-element method and the stability with respect to vertical and lateral direction are compared. The analyzed results suggest the guideline to choose proper types of magnetic levitation for the purpose of the application.