Design of Hybrid Magnetic Stage for a Magnetic–Pneumatic Levitation System

This article presents a magnetic–pneumatic levitation system for gravity offload system of large deployable mechanisms, which combines the attractive force of magnetic stage and thrust force of air-bearing and is characterized by inner stability. The article focuses on the design of the hybrid magnetic stage. The equivalent magnetic circuit network method is used to analyze the electromagnetic (EM)-permanent hybrid magnetic field, the distribution of magnetic flux density of the air gap is solved, and then the magnetic force is obtained. To improve the design efficiency, the two-step design is adopted. First, the air gap is determined by sweeping the reluctance ratio to reduce the influence of parameter deviation of cast iron on the magnetic force. Then, the other parameters of the hybrid magnetic stage are optimized based on the multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) algorithm. Through the comparison between the results of finite-element simulation and prototype experiments, the accuracy of the model is verified, and the expected design goal is achieved.