High-Performance Digital Hydraulic Tracking Control of a Mobile Boom Mockup

The automation of hydraulic mobile machinery, such as excavators, requires high performance control solutions. In hydraulics, this means fast and accurate force, velocity and position control of hydraulic cylinder. Especially the force control is known to be difficult with traditional servo valves. Fast digital hydraulic valves together with modern control solutions can overcome this problem. This paper uses a new force control solution, which is based on the fast digital hydraulic valves and model based control principle. The control solution is applied in a heavy axis mimicking dynamics of mobile machine booms. Experimental results show good force, velocity and position tracking performance with varying load masses. The slow velocity performance is also much improved when compared to the earlier results

Digital Hydraulic Valve Control in a Multi-Pressure System

This paper studies a combination of two concepts: multi-pressure supply line and digital hydraulic valve control. The multi-pressure supply line consists of number of constant pressure supply lines each having a unique supply pressure. A digital flow control unit (DFCU) is connected between each supply line and actuator port in the proposed concept. When compared to traditional load sensing or constant pressure systems, the throttling losses can be significantly reduced by independently controlling the flow from each supply line to inflow-side and outflow-side of the actuator. Two control methods for the DFCUs in multi-pressure system are designed and simulation study is carried out to study the system dynamics and energy efficiency in excavator application. The simulation study compares the characteristics of a proportional valve-based multi-pressure system to DFCU-based multi-pressure system.submittedVersio

Representation Learning for Detecting the Faults in a Wind Turbine Hydraulic Pitch System Using Deep Learning

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Fault Detection in a Wind Turbine Hydraulic Pitch System Using Deep Autoencoder Extracted Features

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Organic carbon causes interference to nitrate and nitrite measurements by UV/Vis spectrometers : The importance of local calibration

Compared with sporadic conventional watersampling, continuous water-quality monitoring with opti-cal sensors has improved our understanding of freshwaterdynamics. The basic principle in photometric measure-ments is the incident light at a given wavelength that iseither reflected, scattered, or transmitted in the body ofwater. Here, we discuss the transmittance measurements.The amount of transmittance is inversely proportional tothe concentration of the substance measured. However, thetransmittance is subject to interference, because it can beaffected by factors other than the substance targeted in thewater. In this study, interference with the UV/Vis sensornitrate plus nitrite measurements caused by organic carbonwas evaluated. Total or dissolved organic carbon as well asnitrate plus nitrite concentrations were measured in variousboreal waters with two UV/Vis sensors (5-mm and 35-mmpathlengths), using conventional laboratory analysis re-sults as references. Organic carbon increased the sensornitrate plus nitrite results, not only in waters with highorganic carbon concentrations, but also at the lower con-centrations (< 10 mg C L−1) typical of boreal stream, river,and lake waters. Our results demonstrated that local cali-bration with multiple linear regression, including bothnitrate plus nitrite and dissolved organic carbon, can cor-rect the error caused by organic carbon. However, high-frequency optical sensors continue to be excellent tools forenvironmental monitoring when they are properly calibrat-ed for the local water matrix.Peer reviewe

A Novel Equivalent Continuous Metering Control With a Uniform Switching Strategy for Digital Valve System

Pulse number modulation (PNM) combined with pulse width modulation (PWM) control is an effective solution to improve the resolution of digital valve systems. However, the numerous discrete variables that use parallel on / off valves cause difficult control coordination and uneven switching. To address this issue, this article defines the equivalent spool displacement of the digital flow control unit by the number of PNM-controlled valves and the duty cycle of PWM-controlled valves to replace multiple discrete variables and develops the equivalent continuous metering control method. Furthermore, a uniform switching control strategy is proposed for the PWM-controlled valve using a uniformly distributed permutation for each on / off valve. The proposed control methods are verified by simulation on the built mathematical model of the equal-coded digital valve system. Experimental results for the displacement control of a hydraulic cylinder at 1 rad/s show that the average error of the equivalent continuous metering control is about 0.236 mm and the dispersion index reaches 20%, while the uniform switching control strategy achieves 80% with an average error of 0.215 mm. Simulated and experimental results demonstrate that the equivalent continuous metering control with a uniform switching strategy can almost evenly distribute switching numbers without compromising the accuracy of the displacement control.Peer reviewe

Variable speed drive with hydraulic boost

This paper studies a variable speed drive with two hydraulic pump motors connected to an actuator. The torque load of the pump motors is reduced by connecting accumulators at different pressures to the inlets of the pump motors. A method for real-time selection of the inlet accumulators is developed. A linearized model is derived, and a robust control approach is used for the controller design of the variable speed drive. Simulation results indicate excellent controllability and robustness together with good energy efficiency. When three accumulators – one being a pressurized tank line – are used, the peak torque is reduced by 52 per cent compared to the traditional solution.publishedVersionPeer reviewe