VALIDATION OF AN EXPERIMENTALLY DERIVED UNCERTAINTY MODEL

The discrepancies between measurement data and an analytical nominal m odel for a large gap magnetic suspension testbed is accounted for by a n uncertainty model. The results show that uncertainty bounds correspo nding to a combination of additive and diagonal input multiplicative u ncertainty can be obtained directly by calculating the smallest norm o f the difference between the measured and nominal model response. Use of the identified uncertainty model allowed a strong correlation betwe en design predictions and experimental results. In addition, robust co ntrollers based on the experimentally derived uncertainty model show s ignificant stability and performance improvements over controllers des igned with assumed ad hoc uncertainty levels.