Modeling and control of the magnetic suspension system

A fuzzy logic based controller applied to a simple magnetic suspension is presented in this paper. The simple electromagnet-ball system and the contactless optical position measurement system are developed as a physical model of the magnetic suspension. A nonlinear mathematical model is presented and linearized. This model has been used to design a discrete linear PID controller with optimal parameters. The physical real-time model was constructed in order to compare the performance of the linear discrete PID controller and the proposed fuzzy logic based PID controller. The decomposed fuzzy PID controller has proportional, integral, and derivative separate parts which are tuned independently. When testing it becomes clear that the decomposed fuzzy PID controller gives better performance over a typical operational range than a traditional linear PID controller.