Experimental Verification of the Suppression Effect of a Gyroscopic Damper on Nonlinear Resonance in a High-Temperature Superconducting Magnetic Levitation System

This paper presents experimental verification of the vibration suppression effect of a gyroscopic damper on a system supported elastically by a superconducting magnetic levitation system when subjected to vibration. While superconducting magnetic levitation systems are capable of uncontrolled and stable levitation, they are prone to multi-degree-of-freedom vibration and nonlinear vibration of the levitating body due to their low damping. In our previous study, we have numerically predicted that a gyroscopic damper, a passive vibration control method, may be effective in simultaneously suppressing translational and tilting vibrations by optimizing the design parameters. In this paper, this vibration suppression effect predicted was investigated through experiments. In the experiment, nonlinear vibration of the levitating body occurred, which may have been caused by the magnetic force of the superconductivity, but the motion coupling of the gyroscopic damper and the levitating body was found to reduce that vibration by 30% in the translational direction and by 40% in the tilting direction. The gyroscopic damper was thus demonstrated to be effective in simultaneously suppressing the translational and tilting vibration of the levitating body.