Design of magnetic gears for space applications

Abstract

In recent years the space industry has experienced a significant change, called New Space. This change has introduced the volume manufacturing and tighter schedules to space industry. This allows the introduction of new technologies previously not used in the space industry. Thus, in this paper, the introduction of magnetic gears in space applications is studied. First of all their advantages over the mechanical gears are presented. Then, the state of the art magnetic gears are studied, followed by a feasibility study of different magnetic gear topologies. Then the most suitable ones are selected, designed and optimized for a practical case, showing promising results and improving performances observed in the literature. Finally, the need of a novel topology is discussed due to the construction difficulty of the designed gears.