Design of a magnetically suspended gyrowheel and analysis of key technologies

A design of the magnetically suspended gyrowheel is proposed in this paper. The rotor of the gyrowheel is supported by Lorentz force magnetic bearings in 5 degrees of freedom. The input angular rates of the device are measured indirectly by utilizing the linear characteristics between the force and the current of the bearings. This innovative device can generate attitude control torque about 3 axes while at the same time measure the spacecraft angular rates about 2 axes. The key technologies of the device are analyzed in the paper. The equation of motion in the rotor coordinates is derived, and the feed forward matrix control is proposed to eliminate the gyroscopic effect on gimbaling control. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The magnetically suspended gyrowheel promises to fulfill the need to lower the volume, mass, power, and launch cost, and has significant application value in small satellite technology.