Abstract
Magnetically levitated (Maglev) vehicles maintain a constant air gap between guideway and car bogie, and thereby achieves non-contact riding. Since the straightness and the flatness of the guideway directly affect the stability of levitation as well as the ride comfort, it is necessary to monitor the status of the guideway and to alert the train operators to any abnormal conditions. In order to develop a signal processing algorithm that extracts guideway irregularities from sensor data, virtual testing using a simulation model would be convenient for analyzing the exact effects of any input as long as the model describes the actual system accurately. Simulation model can also be used as an estimation model. In this paper, we develop a state-space dynamic model of a maglev vehicle system, running on the guideway that contains jumps. This model contains not only the dynamics of the vehicle, but also the descriptions of the power amplifier, the anti-aliasing filter and the sampling delay. A test rig is built for the validation of the model. The test rig consists of a small-scale maglev vehicle, tracks with artificial jumps, and various sensors measuring displacements, accelerations, and coil currents. The experimental data matches well with those from the simulation model, indicating the validity of the model.