Magnetic levitation (Design PID controller)

Abstract

Magnetic levitation systems, based on electromagnetism, are characterized by open loop instability and non linear dynamics are described by highly nonlinear equations that suggest the need of stabilizing controllers which will be design in this project using the MATLAB simulation. Then, a demonstrator was built to understand more about the basic concepts of magnetic levitation. Firstly, from the unstable transfer function of magnetic levitation, a PD controller will be design followed by a PID controller using the MATLAB command. For the hardware, the demonstrator consists three parts which are the wooden base, the circuit and the lifting coil was built to test to levitate a steel ball. As a result, the PD controller applied to the magnetic levitation plant shows that it can improve the transient response by decreasing the settling time and the PID controller improved the steady state error without changing the transient response. The demonstrator was successfully built but because of the time limitation, the steel ball cannot be levitate but only attach to the coil.