Compensation of Hysteresis in Hybrid Reluctance Actuator for High-Precision Motion

In hybrid reluctance actuators for high precision motion control, the magnetic hysteresis in the ferromagnetic stator and mover usually affects the precision. Therefore, this paper proposes magnetic flux estimation and control to compensate for the hysteresis. To measure the magnetic flux at various frequencies, the output signal of a search coil is combined with that of the current monitor of the employed current amplifier in a magnetic flux estimator. Finally, a magnetic flux controller is designed and implemented. For evaluation of the hysteresis compensation, the performance of the hybrid reluctance actuator is compared with both flux and current control. Experimental results show that flux control successfully compensates for some of the nonlinearities of the hybrid reluctance actuator, as the hysteresis is reduced by up to a factor 8.2 and the phase lag of the mover position is reduced by up to 6 deg in comparison with the case of current control.