DESIGN AND EXPERIMENTS OF THE ACTIVE MAGNETIC BEARING SYSTEM FOR THE HTR-10

The 10MW high temperature gas-cooled test modular reactor coupled with direct gas-turbine cycle (HTR-10GT) is designed by the Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology (INET) of Tsinghua University in China, in order to experimentally validate the possibility of creating high performance plants with direct closed gas-turbine cycle and the technology for future commercial applications. The vertical turbomachine shaft of the HTR-10GT is designed to be supported by active magnetic bearings (AMB). First, the reliability and safety, as well as the design requirements and design bases are discussed in this paper. Next, the AMB system is described in detail and the preliminary rotor dynamic analysis is presented. Then two experiments are introduced: one is a small flexible rotor test rig from which the modeling and control method of passing through the bending critical speed are studied; the other is a full size magnetic bearing test rig to research the characteristics of the AMB which will be helpful in the future actual AMB system for the HTR-10GT. If the state-of-the-art concept of AMBs is realized in this project finally, it can be predicted that the application of the AMBs in the design of the HTRs coupled with direct gas-turbine will become largely conventional in the future.