Control of a flexible rotor active magnetic bearing test rig: a characteristic model based all-coefficient adaptive control approach

Abstract

Active magnetic bearings (AMBs) have found a wide range of applications in high-speed rotating machinery industry. The instability and nonlinearity of AMBs make controller designs difficult, and when AMBs are coupled with a flexible rotor, the resulting complex dynamics make the problems of stabilization and disturbance rejection, which are critical for a stable and smooth operation of the rotor AMB system, even more difficult. Proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control dominates the current AMB applications in the field. Even though PID controllers are easy to implement, there are critical performance limitations associated with them that prevent the more advanced applications of AMBs, which usually require stronger robustness and performance offered by modern control methods such as H-infinity control and µ-synthesis. However, these advanced control designs rely heavily on the relatively accurate plant models and uncertainty characterizations, which are sometimes difficult to obtain. In this paper, we explore and report on the use of the characteristic model based all-coefficient adaptive control method to stabilize a flexible rotor AMB test rig. In spite of the simple structure of such a characteristic model based all-coefficient adaptive controller, both simulation and experimental results show its strong performance.