When designing a magnetic levitation system it is assumed that the magnets are ideally magnetized. In practice, however, this is not the case and deviations occur in the magnetization. In this paper two types of deviations are considered, namely a constant angular deviation and the magnetization error. Calculations show that a constant error has larger impact on the performance of a gravity compensator than the magnetization error.

This paper describes the optimisation of the eddy current damping, applied in a passive tuned mass damper (TMD). A semi-analytical model based on scalar potential formulation is extended for different permanent magnet (PM) topologies. Optimal design parameters are acquired by particle swarm optimisation. A 3-DoF mechanical model is presented to predict the quality reduction factor of the TMD. Measurements are performed for validating the semi-analytical model. Furthermore, an experiment is carried out to test a TMD with two optimal PM topologies for sinusoidal excitations.