Failure mode and effect analysis of passive magnetic bearing

•Experimental investigations conducted to identify failure modes of different configurations of Passive Magnetic Bearings•Experimental determination of effects of failure modes on the bearing performance•Experiments determination of the severity, occurrence and detection of the various failure modes•The Risk Priority Number (RPN) of each failure mode is calculated to identify high risk failures•The methods to eliminate/reduce high-risk failure modes are proposed and experimentally validated

In the present research work the failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) process is applied to identify the various possible failure modes of different configurations of passive magnetic bearings (PMB) and the corresponding effects of these failures on the bearing performance. The identified failure modes of PMBs will facilitate designer to incorporate necessary design features that would prevent the occurrence of the failure. Experiments have been conducted to determine the severity, occurrence and detection of the various failure modes. The Risk Priority Number (RPN) of each failure mode is calculated to identify high risk failures. The methods to eliminate or reduce the high-risk failure modes are proposed and experimental investigations are conducted to validate the proposed solutions.