Modeling and identification of an experimental test bench for the study of electrodynamic levitation phenomena

The search for innovative and sustainable solutions in the field of mobility and transport has become one of the main protagonist of the last decade. In this sense, the Hyperloop concept is an interesting and emerging solution able to deliver speed and sustainability to transport people and cargo alike. Such a technology offers diffent advantages: high speed, low carbon emissions, weatherproof, low power consumption, low cost on long run, etc... Despite this, from a technical point of view, some points are still open and the critical issues linked to the dynamics and the instability of the electromagnetic levitation system represent certainly a challange for the Hyperloop technology. In such a context, the work that has been carried out try to give a small and precious contribution to the problem. In particular, the main objective of the thesis is the modeling and the identification of an electromechanical device for the experimental study and the validation of theoretical models related to electrodynamic levitation phenomena. The first part is dedicated to the description of the scale down model that simulated the vertical dynamics of the pod; the chapters that immediately follow resume and describe the multi-domain linear models used in the numerical simulation; the last part of the thesis contains all the experimental measurements. Finally, the fitting between the experimental results and numerical models have been described and a suitable observer able to work in parallel with the scale down model has been introduced. The proposed work has been developed in the Politecnico di Torino in collaboration with the US company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.