Jeong-Min Jo, Young-Jae Han and Chang-Young Lee
International Journal of Railway, vol. 4, no. 4, pp.93-96, 2011

Abstract : The basic element of the EMS suspension is the electromagnet system, which suspends the vehicle without contact by attracting forces to the rails at the guideway. The suspension of a vehicle by attractive magnetic forces is inherently unstable and consequently it is continuously adjusted by the strength of the suspending electromagnet from rail irregularity and bending of the guideway. In order to improve reliable tracking, it needs to get feedback signals without measurement delay time. In this paper the concept of feedback control system with Kalman Filter in EMS is proposed. The input signals in the feedback control system are an air-gap and an acceleration signal. The air-gap signal with noise from the gap sensor is transformed to the filtered air-gap signal y without measurement delay time by using Kalman Filter. The filtered air-gap signal is transformed to a relative velocity and a relative acceleration signal. Then it multiplies these values by gain matrix in order to get the actuator’s reference voltage value. The simulation results show that the dynamic responses of the suspension system can be improved by reducing the influence of measurement delay time of air-gap signals.

Keyword : Electromagnetic suspension, Feedback control, Kalman filter, Magnetic levitation