Levitation control of a hybrid-excited magnetic levitation vehicle

In this paper, the levitation control of a hybrid-excited magnetic levitation (maglev) vehicle is presented. Both electromagnets and permanent magnets are used to levitate the vehicle. The nominal load is levitated by permanent magnet and the current consumption for stable levitation can be reduced. In order to guarantee the tracking performance, the proposed controller is based on the state feedback controller and modified to balance attraction force and total weight. The commanded voltage is utilized instead of the coil current in the feedback loop so that the current measurement is not necessary. A small-scale hybrid-excited maglev vehicle was constructed and some experiments were carried out to show the performance of the proposed control method.