This work was carried out in collaboration with Tom Calvert of NSWCCD. The work resulted in a paper published as

C. Nataraj and Thomas E. Calvert, 2003, Intelligent Ships Symposium, May.

There have been many successful implementations of rotating machinery supported on active electromagnetic bearings; however, there have been some failures with the machinery when deployed on a moving system. This paper derives a compensation scheme to alleviate this problem using a measurement of the support acceleration in a feedforward control loop. The method is applied to a single degree-of-freedom model of a rotor supported on radial magnetic bearings. The mathematical model and the results are presented in nondimensional form to enable application to a wide range of systems. It is shown that the procedure proposed here is effective in reducing failure. In addition, it is shown that the effect of ignoring inherent nonlinearities in the system could lead to gross errors in the prediction of system performance and would hence need to be considered for practical engineering systems.