A mechatronics approach to the servo design for a maglev system

Magnetic levitation systems have become the focus of many research interests because of their frictionless and active stiffness characteristics. However, the maglev systems also represent a highly nonlinear and difficult challenge to the control engineers. In this paper, a mechatronics approach is used to simplify the servo design for the maglev systems. By breaking up the system into small SISO loops, enables the use of a simple control algorithm to achieve complicated control. An investigation on how to adequately partition the experimental maglev is presented. The analysis enables reasonable subsystem partitions, and achieves overall system behavior that is consistent with the predicted subsystem performance