This paper describes how to construct a low-cost magnetic levitation system (MagLev). The MagLev has been intensively used in engineering education, allowing instructors and students to learn through hands-on experiences of essential concepts, such as electronics, electromagnetism, and control systems. Built from scratch, the MagLev depends only on simple, low-cost components readily available on the market. In addition to showing how to construct the MagLev, this paper presents a semi-active control strategy that seems novel when applied to the MagLev. Experiments performed in the laboratory provide comparisons of the proposed control scheme with the classical PID control. The corresponding real-time experiments illustrate both the effectiveness of the approach and the potential of the MagLev for education.
Magnetic Levitation System (MLS) objective is to levitate objects to the desired height without any contact. MLS is highly nonlinear and inherently unstable. Such a system imposes a challenge when designing robust and high-performance controllers. This paper presents the design of a Sliding Mode (SM) controller with an Integral term called SM-I controller to achieve the desired levitation against nonlinearities and uncertainties of the system. The controller parameters are tuned using the Equilibrium Optimizer (EO) algorithm. The Effectiveness of the proposed controller is validated by simulation results. Simulations are performed for servo tracking with and without perturbations in the MLS parameters. The proposed controller is compared with the conventional SM, LQR, and PID controllers to show its superiority. The results prove that the SM-I is more efficient than the other controllers.
Semi-Active Magnetic Levitation System for Education