Adaptive fault-tolerant control of high-speed maglev train suspension system with partial actuator failure: design and experiments

High-speed maglev trains will play an important role in the high-speed transportation system in the near future. However, under the conditions of strong magnetic fields and continuous operation, the actuators of the high-speed maglev train suspension system are prone to lose partial effectiveness, which makes the suspension control problem challenging. In addition, most existing fault-tolerant control (FTC) methods for suspension systems require linearization around the equilibrium points during the controller design or stability analysis. Therefore, from a practical perspective, this study presents a novel nonlinear FTC strategy with adaptive compensation for high-speed maglev train suspension systems. First, a nonlinear dynamic model of the suspension system based on join-structure is established and the actuator failures are described. Then, a nonlinear fault-tolerant suspension control law with an adaptive update law is designed to achieve stable suspension against partial actuator failure. The Lyapunov theory and extended Barbalat lemma are utilized to rigorously prove the closed-loop asymptotic stability even if there is partial actuator failure, without any approximation to the original nonlinear dynamics. Finally, hardware experimental results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.