Maglev self-excited vibration suppression with a virtual sky-hooked damper

Abstract

This work addresses the problem of self-excited vibration, which degrades the stability of the levitation control, decreases the ride comfort, and restricts the construction cost of maglev system. Firstly, a minimum model containing a flexible bridge and a single levitation unit is presented. Based on the simplified model, the principle underlying the self-excited vibration is explored. After investigations about the energy transmission between the levitation system and bridge, it is concluded that the increment of modal damping can dissipate the accumulated energy by the bridge and the self-excited vibration may be avoided. To enlarge the equivalent modal damping of bridge, the sky-hooked damper is adopted. Furthermore, to avoid the hardware addition of real sky-hooked damper, considering the fact that the electromagnet itself is an excellent actuator that is capable of providing sufficiently fast and large force acting on the bridge to emulate the influence of the real sky-hooked damper, the technique of the virtual sky-hooked damper is proposed. The principle underlying the virtual sky-hooked damper by electromagnet is explored and the vertical velocity of bridge is estimated. Finally, numerical and experimental results illustrating the stability improvement of the vehicle-bridge interaction system are provided.