Preview Control of a Superconducting Maglev Vehicle

Abstract A dynamic model of a magnetically-levitated (maglev) vehicle negotiating an elevated guideway is presented. The vehicle employs an electromagnetic suspension (EMS) system with canted magnets that provide simultaneous levitation and guidance. The modeling effort is focused on deriving a realistic dynamic model that includes a five degree-of-freedom nonlinear vehicle model, a superconducting magnet model, and a simply supported, multi-spanned guideway model. The maglev vehicle/guideway model is the basis for testing a proposed control strategy consisting of linear quadratic (LQ) optimal control with a preview (feedforward) feature. The LQ optimal control is augmented with integral action to avoid steady-state gap errors which might otherwise arise from guideway offsets. Simulation studies explore the effectiveness of the controller. The results reveal that the magnet module input voltages and gap errors decrease as the preview distance increases. However, the vehicle performance is limited due to a tradeoff between the carbody acceleration and the gap error.