Thanks Ray. I agree the lower bearing
might prevent the rotor from tilting to contact the top of the stator.
But for me, without knowing the specifics of the motor (height, bearing configuration, airgap), based on typical geometries for squirrel cage motors (I’m not familiar with permanent magnet), it’s not obvious that the lower bearing will guarantee there will be no contact.
I’ll show an example calculation.
Pick a random example bearing 6313 C3.
Look up the internal radial clearance using table 8.3 (and bore diameter 65mm) here
It gives a range 23-43 microns. More internal clearance causes more tilting. Let’s pick the middle of the road 33 microns and assume that when mounted with an interference fit to the shaft, the bearing internal radial clearance is reduced to 30 microns.
How does 30 microns radial internal clearance translate to an ability to tilt the bearing? That is shown in Section 4.7, Figure 1 here:
Select the curve for 6313 bearing and reading up from 30 micron internal clearance, we see the angular clearance is 20 minutes. Since there are 60 minutes per degree, this corresponds to 0.33 degrees. Since there are pi radians per 180 degrees, this corresponds to 0.33*pi/180 = 0.0057 radians, also known as 0.0057 inch per inch.
What happens when we apply a slope 0.0057 inch per inch from bottom bearing up to top of rotor/stator iron. Let’s say the vertical distance is 20”. Then the horizontal offset from center becomes 0.0057 * 20 = 0.11”. That is bigger than many airgaps (for squirrel cage motors at least), there could easily be contact.
Maybe the airgap is larger for these motors. Or maybe the OEM’s will take that into account and select something like a double bearing. Or maybe contact at the top only can be tolerated during assembly/disassembly. It beats me. It’s not all that important to me, I’m just thinking out loud, and after I went through to trouble to do an example calc I decided to capture it here for posterity.
Edit - there may be some factor of 2 funny business with that angle that doesn't make sense to me. They define the angular clearance as
"The angular clearance... is the maximum angular displacement of the two ring axes when one of the bearing rings is fixed and the other is free and unloaded", which seems very straightforward and is the basis for my calculations. But in two places they interject a factor of 2 that doesn't make sense to me. First they say
"In such cases, if the inner and outer ring misalignment angle is greater than a half of the bearing’s angular clearance, it will create an unusual amount of stress" (why half?). Near the end they say
"The deflection angle of the inner and outer rings is +/- theta/2".
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(2B)+(2B)' ?