Multi-cylinder electrohydraulic digital loading technology for reproduction of large load

Abstract

Abstract To solve the problem of the control accuracy in electrohydraulic loading systems caused by load increment, this paper proposes a multi-cylinder electrohydraulic digital loading (MEDL) technology for accurate reproduction of large load. A traditionally used single cylinder loading (SCL) is replaced by a new hydraulic cylinders group that includes N hydraulic cylinders at each point, in which one is controlled by the electrohydraulic servo valve and the others (N-1) are controlled by the on-off valve. The areas of the on-off valve controlled (OVC) cylinders form an increasing geometric sequence with a common ratio of 2. In addition, the force of the servo valve controlled (SVC) cylinder can be regulated continuously, and the OVC cylinders have only two states of no force or maximum force. There should be no force tracking error caused by nonlinear factors for the OVC cylinders. Thus, a continuous accurate large loading can be achieved by changing the working area of the cylinders group. Moreover, an improved full closed-loop (FCL) control strategy is proposed to solve the load reverse sudden change caused by the asynchronous opening and closing of the servo valve and on-off valve. With a case of N\xa0=\xa04 for MEDL, AMESim simulation results illustrated that the tracking error of the 4-cylinder group was about 1/6 of the single cylinder under a case of 40 kN. Furthermore, extensive experiments conducted on a real full loading bench under the FCL control method indicated that compared with SCL, the tracking error of the 4-cylinder group with a multi-step signal and various-frequency sinusoidal signals were reduced by 73% and 46%, respectively. Both simulation and experimental results proved that the proposed MEDL technology improved the loading accuracy and optimized the dynamic performance of the system.