Practical demonstration of an electromagnetic levitation for a cylindrical rod

In this paper an attempt has made for stable suspension of a cylindrical rod under two electromagnets controlling different degrees of freedom movement. The two actuators are controlled independently through two identical controllers and the stable levitation of the rod is achieved through single input and single output (SISO) control of each air-gap corner. The focus is on to design and development of controller unit for two actuators. The proposed single switch based power circuit simplifies the overall hardware and it can be extended to any number of magnet-coil. A cascade lead-lag compensation control scheme utilizing inner current loop and outer position loop has been designed and implemented for stabilization of such highly unstable and strongly non-linear system. The prototype has been successfully tested and stable levitation was demonstrated at the desired operating gap.