Chatter suppression in a high speed magnetic spindle by adding damping

Magnetic bearings are used in several applications, but they didn’t succeed in the machine tool indust ry, due basically to their low damping, with its associated low chatter free cutting capacity. This work shows the development of a high speed milling spindle support ed on magnetic bearings with high chatter resistanc e. That is achieved by using control strategies which add damp ing to the bearings. Excitation by means of the mag netic bearings is used to identify its dynamic behaviour and to optimize the damping parameters. Finally the results of the industrial validation are presented; showing a increase of six times in the cutting capacity .