In the process of vibration suppression of hot galvanized steel strip by using maglev technology, the flexible modal vibration control of steel strip is a challenging problem. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes a phase compensation control algorithm to control the modal vibration in the maglev steel strip vibration suppression system. The modal vibration suppression process is as follows. First, the model of the steel strip and the mode shape and frequency response curve of the strip are established by using the finite element analysis software. Second, the electromagnet-steel strip model is simplified as a single degree of freedom maglev system. Then, the equivalent damping is obtained according to the theory. And the vibration is suppressed according to the principle of the phase compensator. In addition, the effect of the phase lead angle, compensating field and scale factor on the damping performance of the phase compensator from the zero-pole of the closed-loop system is studied. Finally, the experimental study is carried out on the vibration suppression system of maglev steel strip based on phase compensator. The experimental results show that the phase compensator with appropriate parameters can be selected to reduce the amplitude of the first order bending mode by 89.2%. (c) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.