Closed Loop Hydraulic System and Its Effect on Actuator Design

Hydraulic systems provide a clean and stable supply of hydraulic fluid for subsea valves and actuators installed on the subsea bed in subsea production systems.Subsea control systems are used for contemporary subsea fields instead of installing the control system on topside.Although all-electric subsea systems are state-of-the-art with benefits such as health,safety,and environment improvement,as well as efficiency and lower cost,hydraulic systems are still used for the development of many subsea fields.One of the main questions in the selection of a subsea hydraulic field is whether to choose an open or closed loop hydraulic system.The main characteristic of an open loop hydraulic system is that the hydraulic fluid is discharged into the marine environment during the actuation of the subsea valves.Conversely,the hydraulic fluid is returned to the topside facilities through an umbilical system in a closed loop system.Given that closed loop systems are more eco-friendly,the main question in this research is to examine the effect of the actuator connection of the closed loop system on actuator design.Two cases of actuated valves connected to a closed loop system are analyzed in this paper.The first is a 71/16-in.subsea slab gate valve in the pressure class of 517 bar with a linear spring return fail-safe close(FSC)actuator located on a manifold branch.The data indicates that the piston rod and cylinder diameter of the FSC linear actuator should be increased by some millimeters due to the accumulation of hydraulic oil at the bottom of the actuator.The hydraulic oil in the closed loop system helps in closing the actuator and spring force,so the spring constant and torque should be reduced as a result.The second case involves a 16-in.subsea ball valve in the pressure class of 517 bar with a double-acting fail-as-is rack and pinion actuator.The conclusion in this case is to avoid making any change in the design of double-acting actuator in connection to the closed loop system.

Design of passive fault-tolerant flight controller against actuator failures

The problem of designing passive fault-tolerant flight controller is addressed when the normal and faulty cases are prescribed. First of all, the considered fault and fault-free cases are formed by polytopes. As considering that the safety of a post-fault system is directly related to the maximum values of physical variables in the system, peak-to-peak gain is selected to represent the relationships among the amplitudes of actuator outputs, system outputs, and reference commands. Based on the parameter dependent Lyapunov and slack methods, the passive fault-tolerant flight controllers in the absence/presence of system uncertainty for actuator failure cases are designed, respectively. Case studies of an airplane under actuator failures are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Low-resistance, high-force, and large-ROM fabric-based soft elbow exosuits with adaptive mechanism and composite bellows

Due to the lightweight and compliance, fabric-based pneumatic exosuits are promising in the assistance and rehabilitation of elbow impairments. However, existing elbow exosuits generally suffer from remarkable mechanical resistance on the flexion of the elbow, thus limiting the output force, range of motion(ROM), and comfortability. To address these challenges, we develop a fabric-based soft elbow exosuit with an adaptive mechanism and composite bellows in this work. With the elbow kinesiology considered, the adaptive mechanism is fabricated by sewing the interface of the exosuit into spring-like triangle pleats, following the profile of the elbow to elongate or contract when the elbow flexes or extends. The composite bellows are implemented by further sealing a single blade of bellows into two branches to enhance the output force. Based on these structural features, we characterize the mechanical performance of different soft elbow exosuits: exosuit with normal bellows-NB, exosuit with adaptive mechanism and normal bellows-AMNB, exosuit with adaptive mechanism and composite bellows-AMCB. Experimental results demonstrate that by comparing with NB, the mechanical resistance of AMNB and AMCB decreases by 80.6% and 78.6%, respectively;on the other hand, the output torque of AMNB and AMCB increases to 120.3% and 207.0%, respectively, at50 k Pa when the joint angle is 120°. By wearing these exosuits on a wooden arm model(1.25 kg), we further verify that AMCB can cover a full ROM of 0°–130° at the elbow with 500 g weight. Finally, the application on a health volunteer with AMCB shows that when the volunteer flexes the elbow to lift a weight of 500 g, the s EMG activity of the biceps and triceps is markedly reduced.

Robust Adaptive Actuator Failure Compensation for a Class of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems

This paper presents a robust adaptive state feedback control scheme for a class of parametric-strict-feedback nonlinear systems in the presence of time varying actuator failures. The designed adaptive controller compensates a general class of actuator failures without any need for explicit fault detection. The parameters, times, and patterns of the considered failures are completely unknown. The proposed controller is constructed based on a backstepping design method. The global boundedness of all the closed-loop signals is guaranteed and the tracking error is proved to converge to a small neighborhood of the origin. The proposed approach is employed for a two-axis positioning stage system as well as an aircraft wing system. The simulation results show the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed robust adaptive actuator failure compensation approach.