Title: Decentralised control of interacting electrohydraulic actuators in road simulation

Authors: Beshahwired Ayalew, Bohdan T. Kulakowski

Addresses: The Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, 201 Transportation Research Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA. ' The Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, 201 Transportation Research Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA

Abstract: The control loops of the actuators of a road simulator are subjected to load cross-coupling from the dynamics of differential fore to aft and/or left side to right side motions of the test vehicle. In this paper, appropriate interaction measures suitable for time-domain analysis of non-linear systems are presented and used to evaluate the proposed decentralised control structures for a four-post road simulator. A non-linear model of the electrohydraulic actuators and a non-linear multi-body model of a transit bus were developed for this purpose using the commercial software ADAMS. Simulation results show that a decentralised control structure acting on actuator load-plate positions keeps interaction to lower levels than the open-loop case. On the other hand, a decentralised control structure acting on a remote response parameter like spindle vertical acceleration faces strong interaction effects.

Keywords: road simulator; actuator interactions; interaction index; relative gain array; decentralised control; electrohydraulic actuators; simulation; vehicle dynamics; nonlinear control; transit buses; heavy vehicles; multibody models; dynamic modelling; service load testing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHVS.2005.008302

International Journal of Heavy Vehicle Systems, 2005 Vol.12 No.4, pp.307 - 322

Published online: 30 Nov 2005 *

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