Decoupling Control Design for the Module Suspension Control System in Maglev Train

An engineering oriented decoupling control method for the module suspension system is proposed to solve the coupling issues of the two levitation units of the module in magnetic levitation (maglev) train. According to the format of the system transfer matrix, a modified adjoint transfer matrix based decoupler is designed.Then, a compensated controller is obtained in the light of a desired close loop system performance. Optimization between the performance index and robustness index is also carried out to determine the controller parameters. However, due to the high orders and complexity of the obtained resultant controller, model reduction method is adopted to get a simplified controller with PID structure. Considering the modeling errors of the module suspension system as the uncertainties, experiments have been performed to obtain theweighting function of the systemuncertainties. By using this, the robust stability of the decoupled module suspension control system is checked. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed decoupling designmethod is validated by simulations and physical experiments.The results illustrate that the presented decoupling design can result in a satisfactory decoupling and better dynamic performance, especially promoting the reliability of the suspension control system in practical engineering application.