A Design Method for Magnetic Suspension and Vibration Control Of Levitated Beams for Noncontact Processing

This paper presents an integrated approach to magnetic suspension of flexible beams for non-contact processing. The challenges of designing such systems are mainly due to the lightly-damped vibration modes of the suspended structures. Our design goal is to make the suspension robustly stable for beams with varying boundary conditions. In this paper, we propose general design procedures for systems with different dimensions and properties, including structural modelling, sensor design, actuator design, sensor/actuator positioning, and controller design. We demonstrate our proposed ideas in a scaled-down experiment, in which we successfully suspend a 3 m long, 6.35 mm diameter steel tube with varying boundary conditions by using 8 sensors and 8 actuators.