Fault Detection and Diagnosis Methods for Fluid Power Pitch System Components – A Review

Wind turbines have become a significant part of the global power production and are still increasing in capacity. Pitch systems are an important part of modern wind turbines where they are used to apply aerodynamic braking for power regulation and emergency shutdowns. Studies have shown that the pitch system is responsible for up to 20% of the total down time of a wind turbine. Reducing the down time is an important factor for decreasing the total cost of energy of wind energy in order to make wind energy more competitive. Due to this, attention has come to condition monitoring and fault detection of such systems as an attempt to increase the reliability and availability, hereby the reducing the turbine downtime. Some methods for fault detection and condition monitoring of fluid power systems do exists, though not many are used in today’s pitch systems. This paper gives an overview of fault detection and condition monitoring methods of fluid power systems similar to fluid power pitch systems in wind turbines and discuss their applicability in relation to pitch systems. The purpose is to give an overview of which methods that exist and to find areas where new methods need to be developed or existing need to be modified. The paper goes through the most important components of a pitch system and discuss the existing methods related to each type of component. Furthermore, it is considered if existing methods can be used for fluid power pitch systems for wind turbine

Advances in Fluid Power Systems

The main purpose of this Special Issue of “Advances in Fluid Power Systems” was to present new scientific work in the field of fluid power systems for hydraulic and pneumatic control of machines and devices used in various industries. Advances in fluid power systems are leading to the creation of new smart devices that can replace tried-and-true solutions from the past. The development work of authors from various research centres has been published. This Special Issue focuses on recent advances and smart solutions for fluid power systems in a wide range of topics, including: • Fluid power for IoT and Industry 4.0: smart fluid power technology, wireless 5G connectivity in fluid power, smart components, and sensors.• Fluid power in the renewable energy sector: hydraulic drivetrains for wind power and for wave and marine current power, and hydraulic systems for solar power. • Hybrid fluid power: hybrid transmissions, energy recovery and accumulation, and energy efficiency of hybrid drives.• Industrial and mobile fluid power: industrial fluid power solutions, mobile fluid power solutions, eand nergy efficiency solutions for fluid power systems.• Environmental aspects of fluid power: hydraulic water control technology, noise and vibration of fluid power components, safety, reliability, fault analysis, and diagnosis of fluid power systems.• Fluid power and mechatronic systems: servo-drive control systems, fluid power drives in manipulators and robots, and fluid power in autonomous solutions

An unknown input observer-EFIR combined estimator for electro-hydraulic actuator in sensor fault tolerant control application

This paper presents a novel unknown input observer (UIO) integrated extended finite impulse response (EFIR) estimator (UIOEFIR) and its application for an effective sensor fault tolerant control of an electro-hydraulic-actuator (EHA). The proposed estimator exploits the UIO structure in the EFIR filter. Thus, it requires only a small number of historical data (N) whilst ensuring threefold: i) Sensor fault and system-state estimation accuracy under time-correlated noise ii) The number of estimator-design-parameters is significantly minimized. iii) Robust residual generation. A Lyapunov-stability-based theory is carried out to study its convergence condition. Next, an EHAbased test rig has been setup and sensor FTC is performed by carrying this estimator as a part of fault diagnosis algorithm to evaluate its performance by both simulation and realtime experiments. Results highlight that under optimal setting (N = Nopt), the estimator performance is near-accurate to the very-well-developed Extended Kalman Filter-based unknown input observer in an undisturbed condition but significantly outperformed while dealing with time-correlated noise under the same control environment. The estimator also shows its robustness under below-optimal setting (downgrading Nopt by 50%.) while performing in real-time sensor fault-tolerant control

Modeling and fault tolerant control of an electro-hydraulic actuator

In the modern industry, electro-hydraulic actuators (EHAs) have been applied to various applications for precise position pressure/ force control tasks. However, operating EHAs under sensor faults is one of the critical challenges for the control engineers. For its enormous nonlinear characteristics, sensor fault could lead the catastrophic failure to the overall system or even put human life in danger. Thus in this paper, a study on mathematical modeling and fault tolerant control (FTC) of a typical EHA for tracking control under sensor-fault conditions has been carried out. In the proposed FTC system, the extended Kalman-Bucy unknown input observer (EKBUIO) -based robust sensor fault detection and identification (FDI) module estimates the system states and the time domain fault information. Once a fault is detected, the controller feedback is switched from the faulty sensor to the estimated output from the EKBUIO owing to mask the sensor fault swiftly and retains the system stability. Additionally, considering the tracking accuracy of the EHA system, an efficient brain emotional learning based intelligent controller (BELBIC) is suggested as the main control unit. Effectiveness of the proposed FTC architecture has been investigated by experimenting on a test bed using an EHA in sensor failure conditions

Fuzzy robust nonlinear control approach for electro-hydraulic flight motion simulator

AbstractA fuzzy robust nonlinear controller for hydraulic rotary actuators in flight motion simulators is proposed. Compared with other three-order models of hydraulic rotary actuators, the proposed controller based on first-order nonlinear model is more easily applied in practice, whose control law is relatively simple. It not only does not need high-order derivative of desired command, but also does not require the feedback signals of velocity, acceleration and jerk of hydraulic rotary actuators. Another advantage is that it does not rely on any information of friction, inertia force and external disturbing force/torque, which are always difficult to resolve in flight motion simulators. Due to the special composite vane seals of rectangular cross-section and goalpost shape used in hydraulic rotary actuators, the leakage model is more complicated than that of traditional linear hydraulic cylinders. Adaptive multi-input single-output (MISO) fuzzy compensators are introduced to estimate nonlinear uncertain functions about leakage and bulk modulus. Meanwhile, the decomposition of the uncertainties is used to reduce the total number of fuzzy rules. Different from other adaptive fuzzy compensators, a discontinuous projection mapping is employed to guarantee the estimation process to be bounded. Furthermore, with a sufficient number of fuzzy rules, the controller theoretically can guarantee asymptotic tracking performance in the presence of the above uncertainties, which is very important for high-accuracy tracking control of flight motion simulators. Comparative experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which can guarantee transient performance and better final accurate tracking in the presence of uncertain nonlinearities and parametric uncertainties

Nonlinear Fault Detection for Hydraulic Systems

One of the most important areas in the robotics industry is the development of robots capable of working in hazardous environments. As humans cannot safely or cheaply work in these environments, providing a high level of robotic functionality is important. Our work in this area focuses on a fault detection method known as analytical redundancy, or AR. In this paper we discuss the application to a hydraulic servovalve system of our novel rigorous nonlinear AR technique. AR is a model-based state-space technique that is theoretically guaranteed to derive the maximum number of independent tests of the consistency of sensor data with the system model and past control inputs. Conventional linear AR is only valid for linear sampled data systems. However, our new nonlinear AR (NLAR) technique maintains traditional linear AR’s mathematical guarantee to generate the maximum possible number of independent tests in the nonlinear domain. Thus NLAR allows us to gain the benefits of AR testing for nonlinear systems with both continuous and sampled data

Verification and validation of a theoretical model of a direct drive valve-controlled electrohydrostatic actuator for primary flight control

In this work, a theoretical parametric nonlinear model for a hybrid variable pressure actuator was verified through dynamic system modeling techniques and validated using experimental data. The hybrid configuration under investigation combines design features of a valve-controlled hydraulic actuator and an electrohydrostatic actuator resulting in a variable pressure hydraulic actuator. A comparison analysis is conducted to determine the performance and, more specifically, power characteristics of the hybrid configuration relative to the two types of conventional flight control actuation - valve-controlled actuators and electrohydrostatic actuators. The hybrid configuration is unique in the sense that it allows for independent localized hydraulic system pressure control. In this analysis, bang-bang control is implemented by defining low-pressure and high-pressure thresholds resulting in active-passive electrical power consumption. The hybrid configuration was shown to exhibit power input superiority due to duty-cycle behavior of the electrical power element during high-load low-rate scenarios when compared to traditional actuation configurations

On Increasing the Automation Level of Heavy-Duty Hydraulic Manipulators with Condition Monitoring of the Hydraulic System and Energy-Optimised Redundancy Resolution

Hydraulic manipulators on mobile machines are predominantly used for excavation and lifting applications at construction sites and for heavy-duty material handling in the forest industry due to their superior power-density and rugged nature. These manipulators are conventionally open-loop controlled by human operators who are sufficiently skilled to operate the machines. However, in the footsteps of pioneering original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and to keep up with the intensifying demand for innovation, more and more mobile machine OEMs have a major interest in significantly increasing the automation level of their hydraulic manipulators and improving the operation of manipulators. In this thesis, robotic software-based functionalities in the form of modelbased condition monitoring and energy-optimal redundancy resolution which facilitate increased automation level of hydraulic manipulators are proposed.A condition monitoring system generally consists of software modules and sensors which co-operate harmonically and monitor the hydraulic system’s health in real-time based on an indirect measure of this system’s health. The premise is that when this condition monitoring system recognises that the system’s health has deteriorated past a given threshold (in other words, when a minor fault is detected, such as a slowly increasing internal leakage of the hydraulic cylinder), the condition monitoring module issues an alarm to warn the system operator of the malfunction, and the module could ideally diagnose the fault cause. In addition, when faced with severe faults, such as an external leakage or an abruptly increasing internal leakage in the hydraulic system, an alarm from the condition monitoring system ensures that the machine is quickly halted to prevent any further damage to the machine or its surroundings.The basic requirement in the design of such a condition monitoring system is to make sure that this system is robust and fault-sensitive. These properties are difficult to achieve in complex mobile hydraulic systems on hydraulic manipulators due to the modelling uncertainties affecting these systems. The modelling uncertainties affecting mobile hydraulic systems are specific compared with many other types of systems and are large because of the hydraulic system complexities, nonlinearities, discontinuities and inherently time-varying parameters. A feasible solution to this modelling uncertainty problem would be to either attenuate the effect of modelling errors on the performance of model-based condition monitoring or to develop improved non-model-based methods with increased fault-sensitivity. In this research work, the former model-based approach is taken. Adaptation of the model residual thresholds based on system operating points and reliable, load-independent system models are proposed as integral parts of the condition monitoring solution to the modelling uncertainty problem. These proposed solutions make the realisation of condition monitoring solutions more difficult on heavy-duty hydraulic manipulators compared with fixed-load manipulators, for example. These solutions are covered in detail in a subset of the research publications appended to this thesis.There is wide-spread interest from hydraulic manipulator OEMs in increasing the automation level of their hydraulic manipulators. Most often, this interest is related to semi-automation of repetitive work cycles to improve work productivity and operator workload circumstances. This robotic semi-automated approach involves resolving the kinematic redundancy of hydraulic manipulators to obtain motion references for the joint controller to enable desirable closed-loop controlled motions. Because conventional redundancy resolutions are usually sub-optimal at the hydraulic system level, a hydraulic energy-optimised, global redundancy resolution is proposed in this thesis for the first time. Kinematic redundancy is resolved energy optimally from the standpoint of the hydraulic system along a prescribed path for a typical 3-degrees-of-freedom (3-DOF) and 4-DOF hydraulic manipulator. Joint motions are also constrained based on the actuators’ position, velocity and acceleration bounds in hydraulic manipulators in the proposed solution. This kinematic redundancy resolution topic is discussed in the last two research papers. Overall, both designed manipulator features, condition monitoring and energy-optimised redundancy resolution, are believed to be essential for increasing the automation of hydraulic manipulators

Pipeline Monitoring Architecture based on observability and controllability Analysis

Recently many techniques with different applicability have been developed for damage detection in the pipeline. The pipeline system is designed as a distributed parameter system, where the state space of the distributed parameter system has infinite dimension. This paper is dedicated to the problem of observability as well as controllability analysis in the pipeline systems. Some theorems are presented in order to test the observability and controllability of the system. Computing the rank of the controllability and observability matrix is carried out using Matlab