Study on the speed and location system for low speed maglev vehicle

The maglev vehicle doesn´t have physical contact with the rails, so its speed and location detection system has to be designed using a non-contact measurement method. This paper simply discusses different speed and location detection methods of the maglev rail transportation, and the comparison of their merits and drawbacks is given. According to the comparison results, the method based on the inductive looped-cable is recommended and two different schemes are analysed and designed, which are called amplitude detection method and phase detection method. These inductive looped-cable systems were tested by experiments taken on the maglev track. The result shows that the phase detection method could play a good effect and has a good prospect.