Research on lateral stability of passive-guided maglev with bench experiment

To study the lateral stability of the electromagnet in a passive-guided maglev system, a non-autonomous nonlinear differential equation that retains the lateral motion characteristics of the electromagnet was derived from reasonable assumptions. The stability at the equilibrium point of the equation can be determined by whether the eigenvalues of the coefficient matrix of the Poincaré map of the linearized equation are within the unit circle centered at the origin. This process yields the linear stability boundaries regarding the parameters of the electromagnet's lateral motion equation. It was discovered through the positions where the eigenvalues cross the unit circle at the time of linear instability that the Poincaré map of the equation may undergo flip or pitchfork bifurcation when crossing from different linear stability boundaries, which results in vibration orbits with varying symmetries during lateral instability. An experiment on the influence of vertical excitation on lateral stability was conducted using a levitation frame vibration experimental bench. The experiment demonstrated that the theoretical analysis on stability and orbit symmetry is reliable.