The Exponential Reaching Law Sliding Mode Control of Magnetic

Levitation System
Xue-juanSHAO, Fan-bin MENG, Zhi-mei CHEN, Qiu-sheng He
College of Electronic Information Engineer, Taiyuan University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China
E-mail: sxj0351@163.com

Abstract: The magnetic levitation ball system has nonlinear and open loop instability. The model was linearized near the
equilibrium point and the exponential reaching law sliding mode controller was designed according to the state equations
of the system in this paper. The stability of the system was analyzed by using Lyapunov stability theory. The experiment
was carried on magnetic levitation ball system device. The results show that using the exponential reaching law sliding
mode control can make the magnetic levitation ball with small deviations in the vicinity of a given location, and the
system has good tracking performance.
Key Words: Magnetic Levitation System, Exponential Reaching Law, Sliding Mode Control

1 Instructions 2 Mathematical model

Magnetic levitation system is a single degree of freedom The control structure of the magnetic levitation ball system
and open loop unstable nonlinear system. The character of is shown in Figure 1.
the system will be affected by the system parameters
perturbation and external disturbance factors. When using Current Amplifier
the traditional PID control, the system has good stability. Electromagnetic u
However, the control performance of the system is limited Actuator
f D/A
due to the fixed controller parameters. In order to solve this x
xv Board
problem, many new control strategies which are applied in A/D

Light Ball Sensor

the magnetic levitation ball system are introduced, such as
fuzzy control[1], fuzzy PID[2], robust control[3,4], predictive
control[5], sliding mode control[6-9] and so on.
Sliding mode control (SMC) does not require a precise
object model, and has the advantages of fast response speed,
no sensitivity to parameters and external disturbance and so
on[10,11]. At present, it has been applied in the field of motor
and power system control, robot control, aircraft control and
satellite attitude control. The most significant
characteristics of sliding mode control are the existence of
sliding mode. Once the system is in the sliding mode, its
motion state will remain in a neighborhood of the switching
surface or the switching surface. At the same time, the
system has strong robustness to external disturbance. In this
paper, the exponential reaching law sliding mode control is
used in the magnetic levitation ball system. The
experimental results show that using the exponential
reaching law of SMC can not only make the magnetic
levitation ball reach a steady state of suspension, and the
system has good tracking performance.
This work is supported by National Science Foundation of Shanxi
province(2014011020-1,2;2013011035-2), Postgraduate Education
Reform Project of Shanxi Province(20132050) and Postgraduate Science
and Technology Innovation Project Of Taiyuan University of Science and
Technology(20145020).
Source
mg
Computer
Figure 1. Control structure of magnetic levitation ball system
In the picture, m is the steel ball quality, g is the gravity
acceleration, x is the distance between the center of steel
ball and the electromagnet pole and f is the electromagnetic
force. u provides the control voltage for the external circuit
and xv is the sensor output voltage corresponding to the steel
ball position.
Ignoring the influence of other external interference factors,
the small ball is attracted by electromagnetic force F(i,x)
and the impact of its own gravity mg in the vertical direction.
By analyzing the mechanism of the magnetic levitation ball
system, the following mathematical model can be
established:
d 2 x(t )
Kinetic equation: m  mg  F i, x (1)
dt 2
i
Electromagnetic mechanical equation: F (i, x)  K ( ) 2 (2)
x
di(t )
Electrical equation: U (t )  Ri(t ) L (3)
dt
In the above formula, i is the current in the electromagnetic
coil, R is the resistance of the electromagnetic coil, and L is
the inductance of the electromagnetic coil.

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When the steel ball is in a stable suspension as x=x0, the where c is a constant.
current in the electromagnetic coil is i=i0, the equation of the
The time derivation of Eq. 10 is
ball at equilibrium point is
s  ce1 e2  c(r  x1 ) 
r  x2 (11)
F (i0 , x0 )  mg (4)
In order to facilitate the design of the controller, the system The following equation can be given by substitution of the
is linearized at the equilibrium position (i0, x0). The F(i,x) in Eq. 9 into the Eq. 11.
the Eq. 1 is carried out by the Taylor series expansion, and s  ce1 
r  f ( x, t )  au(t ) (12)
the high order term is neglected and Laplace transform is
performed. The result is The sliding mode control rate u(t) is obtained by using the
X (s) 1 equivalent control method in ideal state of s  0 .
 (5) 1
I (s) (i0 2 g ) s 2  i0 x0 u (t )  (
r  f ( x, t ) ce2 ) (13)
In the actual control, the controlled variable is the input a
voltage of the power amplifier, and the relationship between The complete sliding mode motion contains both the sliding
the sensor output xv and the input voltage of the power mode and reaching movement. The reach ability condition
amplifier u is of the sliding mode control can only guarantee the moving
(K x Ka ) point of the arbitrary state space to reach the switching
X (s)
G(s)  v  (6) surface within a limited time. But there is no limit on the
U (s) (i0 2 g ) s 2  i0 x0 approaching trajectory. In order to improve the system
where Kx is sensor gain and Ka is the gain of power dynamic performance, the sliding mode controller is usually
amplifier. designed based on reaching law method. Common reaching
The parameters of the physical system considered are law methods are constant reaching law, exponential
presented in Table 1. reaching law and power reaching law etc.

Table1. The physical MAGLEV system parameters The following index reaching law method is used to design
the sliding mode controller.
Parameters Value
m-Mass of the steel ball 0.022kg s  I sgn(s)  ks, I  0 (14)
g-Acceleration due to gravity 9.81m/s2 In the formula, s  ks is exponential reaching, k is
i0-Equilibrium value of current 1.2441A reaching law and η is the gain coefficient.
x0-Equilibrium value of position 0.035m In the simple exponential approach law, movement point of
Ka-Control voltage to coil current gain 5.8829A/V the system approximating the switching surface is an
Kx-Sensor gain -458.7156V/m asymptotic approximation process. It can’t guarantee the
T-Sampling time 0.003s. system state reach the switching surface in finite time. So the
sliding mode will no longer exist. In order to ensure to reach
By the Eq. 6, it is known that the magnetic levitation system the switching surface in finite time, a constant reaching
is an unstable second-order object. Therefore, it is necessary s  I sgn(s) must be increased. When s is close to zero
to combine the closed-loop control with the controller to
make the controlled ball reach the stable suspension state. and closer to speed the η is not equal to zero. In order to
improve the reaching effect and weaken the chattering
phenomenon, the reaching law k must be increased and the
3 The design of sliding mode controller
gain coefficient η values must be reduced.
Defining a set of state variables as
Combining Eq. 13 and Eq. 14, the following formula can be
x1  xv , x2  x1  xv , y  xv (7)
obtained.
Then the above system in Eq.6 can be transformed into the 1
state equation u (t )  [r  f ( x, t ) ce2 I sgn(s) ks] (15)
a
£
¦ x1 (t )  x2 (t )
¦
¤ (8) Stability analysis is carried out by using the Lyapunov
¦
¥ x2 (t )  f ( x, t ) au (t )
¦ stability theory. Substituting the Eq. 15 into the Eq. 12, the
2g 2 gK a formula can be given
where f ( x, t )  x1 (t ) , a   represent the s  I sgn(s)  ks (16)
x0 i0 K x
Then
variables of the system.
The input signal and the output displacement for the given ss  I | s | ks 2  0 (17)
system are r and x1. The position error e1 and the error rate is The stability condition is
e2 of the system is defined in the following. 1 d 2
(s )  0 (18)
e1  r  x1 2 dt
(9)
e2  e1  r  x1  r  x2 The system can meet the condition.

The defined sliding mode surface function is as follows:

s  ce1 e2 , c  0 (10)

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 4 The Simulation and experimental study can be compiled into the code that runs in real-time
environment.
In this paper, the exponential reaching law sliding mode
control method was applied to the Googol (a company) Because the magnetic pole surface of the magnetic
magnetic levitation device. The parameters of the physical levitation ball system is defined as coordinate zero and the
system are presented in Table 1. With these parameters, the negative direction is down. The displacement of a given
state equation of the plant becomes input signal must be negative, namely the input signal
£
¦
¦ x1 (t )  x2 (t ) r=0.2sin(2πt)-3.
¤ (19)
¦
¥ x2 (t )  560 x1 (t ) 1226u (t )
¦ The model of magnetic ball control system is built in
When the system is simulated, the input signal is Matlab/Simulink environment. After compiling, linking it
r=0.2sin2πt.The simulation results of the system are shown successfully and clicking on run, the system can be operated
in Figure 2. Can be seen from the pictures, the system has in real-time circumvent. The real-time output curve, error
good tracking performance. tracking curve, controller output of the control system are
shown in Figure 3.
0.2
2
0.1 -3

0 -4
xv(t)/V

xv(t)/V
-0.1 -5

-6
0.2
Reference input
-7
0.3 Position tracking
-8
0 1 2 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5
Time/s Time/s
(a) Position tracking curve (a) Position tracking curve
2 2
1.5
1
1
s(t)/V

Error/V

0 0.5

-1 0

-0.5
-2
-1
0 1 2 Time/s 3 4 5 0 1 2 3 4 5
Time/s
(b) Error tracking curve
(b) The output of sliding surface
15
0.4
10
0.2
5
u(t)/V
u(t)/V

0
0

-0.2 -5

-10
-0.4 0 1 2 3 4 5
0 1 2 Time/s 3 4 5 Time/s
(c) The output of sliding mode controller (c) The output of sliding mode controller
Fig 2. Simulation curve of magnetic levitation system Fig 3. Real-time control curve of sliding mode controller

In the experiment, the data acquisition card is Advantech
PCI1711 card which can connect the computer with
magnetic levitation system. Using C language the controller
can be written into a C-MEX S function which may be
compiled by the real-time control (RTW) toolbox. Then the
system can generate a dynamic link library (.dll) file. The
operating state of the system can be changed by modifying
the parameters in the dynamic link library. After the RTW
code generation is completed in the external mode, the
system object file is rtwin.tlc, and the control system model
By the experiment results, we can see that the steel ball can
reach the stable state in 1s and it can be suspended at a given
position with a small deviation. The output of the system has
no big fluctuation phenomenon and the tracking performan
-ce of the system is good.
5 Conclusions
The magnetic levitation ball system has nonlinear and open
loop instability. The design method of sliding mode variable
structure control is simple and easy to implement.
Combining with exponential reaching law method, the

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sliding mode controller was designed based on the sliding
mode variable structure control principle in this paper. The
stability of the system was analyzed by using Lyapunov
stability theory. The experiment was carried on magnetic
levitation ball system device. The experimental results
show that the sliding mode control method can make the
controlled ball achieve the state of suspension in a relatively
short time and the system has good tracking performance.
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Authorized licensed use limited to: Walchand College of Eng. Downloaded on January 09,2023 at 12:10:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
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