Position Control of a Maglev System Fed by a DC/DC Buck Power Electronic Converter

In this paper, we solve the problem of position regulation in a magnetic levitation system that is fed by a DC/DC Buck power electronic converter as a power amplifier. We present a formal asymptotic stability proof. Although this result is local, the merit of our proposal relies on the fact that this is the first time that such a control problem is solved for a magnetic levitation system, a nonlinear electromechanical plant. In this respect, we stress that most works in the literature on control of electromechanical systems actuated by power electronic converters are devoted to control brushed DC motors which are well known to have a linear model. Furthermore, despite the plant that we control in the present paper is complex, our control law is simple. It is composed by four nested loops driven by one sliding mode controller, two proportional-integral controllers, and a nonlinear proportional-integral-derivative position controller. Each one of these loops is devoted to control each one of the subsystems that compose the plant: electric current through the converter inductor, voltage at the converter capacitor, electric current through the electromagnet, and position of the ball. Thus, our proposal is consistent with the simple and intuitive idea of controlling each subsystem of the plant in order to render robust the control scheme. We stress that such a solution is complicated to derive using other control approaches such as differential flatness or backstepping. In this respect, our proposal relies on a novel passivity-based approach which, by exploiting the natural energy exchange between the mechanical and electrical dynamics, renders possible the design of a control scheme with the above cited features.