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 industry, 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 supported on magnetic bearings with high chatter resistance. That is achieved by using control strategies which add damping to the bearings. Excitation by means of the magnetic bearings is used to identify its dynamic behaviour and to optimize the damping parameters. Finally the results of the industrial validation are presented; showing an increase of six times in the cutting capacity.