Parameter Tuning Method for Dither Compensation of a Pneumatic Proportional Valve with Friction

In the practical application of pneumatic control devices, the nonlinearity of a pneumatic control valve become the main factor affecting the control effect, which comes mainly from the dynamic friction force. The dynamic friction inside the valve may cause hysteresis and a dead zone. In this paper, a dither compensation mechanism is proposed to reduce negative effects on the basis of analyzing the mechanism of friction force. The specific dither signal（using a sinusoidal signal） was superimposed on the control signal of the valve. Based on the relationship between the parameters of the dither signal and the inherent characteristics of the proportional servo valve, a parameter tuning method was proposed, which uses a displacement sensor to measure the maximum static friction inside the valve. According to the experimental results, the proper amplitude ranges are determined for different pressures. In order to get the optimal parameters of the dither signal, some dither compensation experiments have been carried out on different signal amplitude and gas pressure conditions. Optimal parameters are determined under two kinds of pressure conditions. Using tuning parameters the valve spool displacement experiment has been taken. From the experiment results, hysteresis of the proportional servo valve is significantly reduced. And through simulation and experiments, the cut-off frequency of the proportional valve has also been widened. Therefore after adding the dither signal, the static and dynamic characteristics of the proportional valve are both improved to a certain degree. This research proposes a parameter tuning method of dither signal, and the validity of the method is verified experimentally.

Adaptive Robust Dead-Zone Compensation Control of Electro-Hydraulic Servo Systems with Load Disturbance Rejection

A backstepping method based adaptive robust dead-zone compensation controller is pro- posed for the electro-hydraulic servo systems （EHSSs） with unknown dead-zone and uncertain system parameters. Variable load is seen as a sum of a constant and a variable part. The constant part is regarded as a parameter of the system to be estimated real time. The variable part together with the friction are seen as disturbance so that a robust term in the controller can be adopted to reject them. Compared with the traditional dead-zone compensation method, a dead-zone compensator is incor- porated in the EH$S without constructing a dead-zone inverse. Combining backstepping method, an adaptive robust controller （ARC） with dead-zone compensation is formed. An easy-to-use ARC tuning method is also proposed after a further analysis of the ARC structure. Simulations show that the proposed method has a splendid tracking performance, all the uncertain parameters can be estimated, and the disturbance has been rejected while the dead-zone term is well estimated and compensated.