Comparison of Advanced Multivariable Control Techniques for Axial-Piston Pump

This article is devoted to a comparison of two advanced control techniques applied to the same plant. The plant is a certain type of axial-piston pump. A linear-quadratic (LQR) controller and an H-infinity (H_∞) controller were synthesized to regulate the displacement volume of the pump. The classical solution to such a problem is to use a hydro-mechanical controller (by pressure, flow rate, or power) but, in the available sources, there are solutions that implement proportional-integral-derivative (PID), LQR, model predictive control (MPC), etc. Unlike a classical solution, in our case, the hydro-mechanical controller is replaced by an electro-hydraulic proportional valve, which receives a reference signal from an industrial microcontroller. It is used as the actuator of the pump swash plate. The pump swash plate swivel angle determines the displacement volume, respectively, and the flow rate of the pump. The microcontroller is capable of embedding various control algorithms with different structures and complexities. The developed LQR and H_∞ controllers are compared in the simulation and real experiment conditions. For this purpose, the authors have developed a laboratory experimental test bench, enabling a real-time function of the control system via USB/CAN communication. Both controllers are compared under different pump loading modes. Also, this paper contributes an uncertain model of an axial-piston pump with proportional valve control that is obtained from experimental data. Based on this model, the robust stability of the closed-loop system is investigated by comparing the structure of a singular value (μ). The investigations show that both control systems achieved robust stability. Moreover, they can tolerate up to four times larger uncertainties than modeled ones. The system with the H_∞ controller attenuates approximately at least 30 times the disturbances with frequency up to 1 rad/s while the system with the LQR controller attenuates at least 10 times the same disturbances.