Design and Analysis of Controllers for Magnetic Levitation Systems

Abstract

Magnetic levitation (Maglev) has been a keen area of research, especially in the field of transportation. Maglev is used to reduce the maintenance cost, increase efficiency, and thereby the useful life of the system is increased. Maglev has numerous practical applications in the research and development industry where friction must be reduced or eliminated. Some of the more promising applications are transportation (low and high-speed maglev), low friction bearings for gyroscopes and flywheel energy storage. Other applications have been proposed, such as levitation melting of conductive metals. Applications such as eddy current braking and induction heating that involves similar physical processes as magnetic levitation can be analyzed using similar or slightly modified solution techniques. Eddy-current damping is a key technique that improves levitation performance to increase the diversity of applications of magnetic levitation systems. Eddy-current damping is formed by a conductive plate placed below the levitating object, which is used to suppress vibrations and ensure stability. To understand the system behaviour, it is very important to derive the analytical relation for the eddy current based force. It is a function of the plate thickness and its distance to the per magnet. Position control of the maglev system is not an easy task. Literature shows several authors have proposed different controllers to stabilise the position of the object in the air. The main drawback is that the controllers are designed by neglecting the eddy-current-based force due to the motion of the levitated object. In the present work, parameters of Single-sided linear induction motor (SLIM) are calculated based on rotary induction motor principle and same has been implemented in the design of prototype SLIM. A PID controller based on cuckoo search algorithm is designed for the speed control of SLIM. The computation results show that the proposed SLIM drive system is appropriate for driving the maglev transportation Prototype. In the present work, parameters of Single-sided linear induction motor (SLIM) are calculated based on rotary induction motor principle and same has been implemented in the design of prototype SLIM. A PID controller based on cuckoo search algorithm is designed for the speed control of SLIM.