Abstract: The rotor in five degrees of freedom controlled bearingless axial flux motor(5-DOF BLAM) can be suspended by the electromagnetic force. Thus, there are many advantages such as no friction, no pollution, maintenance-free, and long operating life. Therefore, 5-DOF BLAM has broad application prospects in the fields of pharmaceutical, aerospace, and semiconductor industries. Depending on the load carried by the rotor, a 5-DOF BLAM has different requirements for active suspension force/torque. Hence, it is important to optimize the 5-DOF BLAM to match the requirements for the active suspension force/torque under the minimum levitation current. In this paper, the operation mechanism of the 5-DOF BLAM with arbitrary rotor pole pairs was analyzed. Then, three general rules of design and control of the 5-DOF BLAM were proposed. Next, a 5-DOF BLAM with a 7-pole-pair rotor was designed following the above general rules and analyzed by the finite element analysis(FEA) method. The validity of the general rules 1 and 2 can be confirmed by the FEA results. Moreover, this paper also analyzed the variation of active suspension force/torque of the 5-DOF BLAM under different stator/rotor diameters and split ratios, which confirmed the validity of the general rule 3. Finally, the suspension process of the 5-DOF BLAM prototype was also tested. The experimental results show that the designed 5-DOF BLAM can realize independent decoupling control of each degree according to the obtained general rules, and the 5-DOF BLAM rotor can realize stable suspension with 5-DOFs.