Electromagnetic actuator design for the control of light structures

Abstract

An ElectroMagnetic Actuator (EMA) is designed and assessed numerically and experimentally. The EMA has the advantage to be without contact with the structure so it could be applied to light and small mechanism. Nevertheless, the open-loop instability and the nonlinear dynamic behavior with respect to the excitation frequency could limit its application field. The EMA is designed and dimensioned as a function of the experimental structure to be controlled. An inverse model of the EMA is proposed in order to implement a linear action block for the used frequency range. The control strategy is a fuzzy controller with displacements and velocities as inputs. A fuzzy controller of Takagi-Sugeno type is used. The air gap is estimated by using a modal approximation of the displacements issued from all measurements. Several configurations of control are assessed by using numerical simulations. The block diagram used for numerical simulations is implemented under Dspace environment. The implemented controller was tested experimentally in the context of impact perturbations. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the developed procedures and the robustness of the implemented control.