Design and Implementation of an Uncoupled and Parallelly Actuated Control for the Highly Nonlinear Suspension System of a Maglev Train

As the technologies used in automatic machines are becoming more advanced, the requirements for their control systems are growing in complexity alongside them. This is specially true when talking about the state-of-the-art technologies used in transportation, as is the highly nonlinear Electromagnetic Suspension (EMS) system of a high-speed Magnetic Levitation (Maglev) train, where a very accurate and highly robust control system is required. The implementation of a control of this type requires of a deep knowledge of the physics behind the system, followed by the design of a high performance control, even when using standard control methods. Moreover, as the Maglev technology is still very new and under development, seldom it is possible to test a developed control on a real Maglev system for getting accurate experimental results. Therefore the importance of this work, which explores, through simulation and experimental tests, the development and implementation of an uncoupled and parallelly actuated PID control for the purpose of levitating an accurately scaled Maglev EMS system (a 1:29 scaled prototype of the EMS system in a bogie of the Shanghai Maglev train), yielding valuable experimental results. The results obtained show that the levitation is feasible by using the purposed control technique, but they also highlight the importance of taking into account the inherent coupling of the system for achieving better performance results.