Nonlinear control of magnetically-geared drive-trains

The paper considers certain impedimental issues related to the use of magnetic gearbox and magnetic coupling technologies in high performance servo control systems. A prototype magnetic coupling is used as a basis for demonstrating that the underlying torque transfer characteristic is significantly nonlinear when transmitted torque approaches the maximum designed pull-out torque of the device. It is shown that linear controllers for speed control proportional plus integral (PI) and position control proportional plus derivative (PD) result in acceptable performance provided the magnetic coupling operates below 80% of designed pull-out torque. To fully compensate for the inherent nonlinearity of the torque transfer characteristic, feedback linearizing control laws and state transformations are derived resulting in exactly linear input-output characteristic for position and speed control of magnetically-geared drive-trains. With the addition of state feedback, the closed-loop dynamics for both position and speed control of a magneticallygeared drive-train can be designed to satisfy the integral of time multiplied by absolute error (ITAE) optimized linear response for a step input. Outstanding results are demonstrated through simulation and experimental real-time implementation on a demonstrator magnetically-geared drive-train. © 2013 Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.