Control Techniques for Electrohydraulic Actuators in Aerospace, Civil and Robotics Engineering

A special issue of Actuators (ISSN 2076-0825).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2020) | Viewed by 7128

Special Issue Editor

Systems Department, National Institute for Aerospace Research “Elie Carafoli”—INCAS, Blvd. Iuliu Maniu 220, 061126 Bucharest, Romania
Interests: analysis, synthesis, qualification testing and flight clearance for aircraft and helicopters electrohydraulic and electromechanical servomechanisms design; active and semiactive control; anti-blocking systems (ABS); smart aerospace structures; structural health monitoring (SHM); stability robustness and performance robustness—analysis and synthesis; linear and nonlinear control synthesis: LQG control, Hinfinity control, backstepping control, sliding mode control, geometric control; intelligent control synthesis: neural control, fuzzy control
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Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues

After World War II, the use of electrohydraulic actuators (EHAs) spread significantly and they became the right choice for a variety of areas, including civil engineering, machine tools, mobile equipment and robots, radar antenna, land vehicles, naval and aerospace systems, and missile launchers. EHS is in fact a position tracking system, but EHA as a stabilizing system can be viewed as a special case of the tracking system. An eloquent example of practical interest for EHA as a stabilizing system is the well-known problem of altitude-hold autopilot synthesis, involving an EHA, where the target is the maintenance of the desired altitude of the aircraft, thus allowing the pilot to perform other more important tasks.

Therefore, the study of stabilization and tracking problems for EHAs remains attractive and important. EHAs do not only allow the generation of large forces but, thanks to modern control technology and sensors, are also capable of assuming important control tasks, such as highly precise positioning of heavy loads.

The mathematical model of servovalve-controlled EHA is a strongly nonlinear one and reveals a switching nonlinearity due to constructive directional changes in the spool valve ports opening. This physical aspect gives the mathematical model the statute of a system with structural, autonomous switching. EHA is itself an actuator with feedback, but it can be viewed broadly as a system with feedback of the real world, and the delay on control will be regarded as a delay of the control signal in the block of the electrohydraulic servovalve. If we also consider the delay in the elaboration of the control law, the mathematical model of EHA becomes even more challenging.

Noting the competition with other types of actuators—electromechanical actuators, hydrostatic actuators, piezo actuators (see the so-called “green aircraft”)—we believe that the EHAs will for many years still be the right choice in many application domains.

This Special Issue is devoted to coverage of various advanced approaches in control techniques of EHAs, including for electrohydrostatic actuators: LQG, backstepping, sliding mode, and geometric control; adaptive control synthesis; intelligent control synthesis: neural, and fuzzy control; systems with delay; switching systems; Liapunov stability; and critical stability.

Dr. Ioan Ursu
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • Electrohydraulic actuators
  • Electrohydrostatic actuators
  • Control techniques
  • LQG
  • Backstepping
  • Sliding mode
  • Geometric
  • Adaptive
  • Neural
  • Fuzzy
  • Delay
  • Switching
  • Stability
  • Robustness

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 1619 KiB  
Article
Feedforward Plus Feedback Control of an Electro-Hydraulic Valve System Using a Proportional Control Valve
by Young-Rae Ko and Tae-Hyoung Kim
Actuators 2020, 9(2), 45; https://doi.org/10.3390/act9020045 - 15 Jun 2020
Cited by 18 | Viewed by 6339
Abstract
The output feedback signal of the electro-hydraulic valve system (EHVS) affects the activation of its right or left envelope function; thus, even weak measurement noise can cause high-frequency switching between the two envelope functions, leading to chattering in the control input. Consequently, feedforward [...] Read more.
The output feedback signal of the electro-hydraulic valve system (EHVS) affects the activation of its right or left envelope function; thus, even weak measurement noise can cause high-frequency switching between the two envelope functions, leading to chattering in the control input. Consequently, feedforward and feedback controllers in a cascaded configuration generate undesirable chattering in the output signal. We propose a practical and reliable control approach for an EHVS actuated by a proportional control valve. The proposed controller has a parallel structure comprising an inverse generalized Prandtl–Ishlinskii (P–I) model-based feedforward controller, with both hydraulic dead-zone and flow saturation limits, for compensating asymmetric hysteretic behavior. Further, the proposed controller comprises a robust proportional-integral-derivative (PID) feedback controller for achieving robustness against disturbances and noises. The proposed parallel structure is independent of the output feedback of the EHVS. Moreover, the proposed robust PID feedback controller guarantees EHVS stability by precisely selecting the cutoff frequency for the sensitivity and complementary sensitivity functions based on the amplitude spectrum of the inverse-model-based feedforward compensation error. The results verify the high reliability of the proposed EHVS control scheme for the precise control of an EHVS actuated by a proportional control valve in practice. Full article
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