A Comparative Study between Fractional Order SMC and SMC Applied to Magnetic Levitation System

There is a trend in last one and a half decade to incorporate fractional calculus into the well-known integer order controllers to upgrade it to the respective fractional order controllers to achieve better performance. Such an attempt is made in this paper. This paper presents a comparative study between Sliding Mode Controller and Fractional Order Sliding Mode Controller when applied to a Magnetic Levitation (MagLev) system. The effectiveness of the controllers is tested to levitate a ferromagnetic ball against gravity and control its vertical position to follow standard test signals as reference. A MagLev laboratory setup is used as a platform for experimental validation. The results reveal that FOSMC outperforms SMC in terms of tracking accuracy, speed of response, and chattering.