Practical Tracking Control of the Electropneumatic Piston Drive

Abstract

According to the fundamental importance of the tracking theory on technical systems, the main goal of this paper is further development of the theory and the application of tracking, especially on the practical tracking concept. The plant under consideration is a pneumatic cylinder supplied with pressurized air by an electropneumatic servovalve. This system is often applied as the final control element of the controller in automatic control systems. The correction device for the mentioned plant will be a digital computer. The pure inertial load of the pneumatic cylinder will be time variable. Therefore this plant belongs to the unstationary class of systems. For time varying desired output value the control algorithm will be synthesized. The control algorithm is based on the self-adjustment principle. Structural characteristic of such a control system is existence of two feedbacks: global negative of the output value and local positive of the control value. Such a structure ensures synthesis of the control without the internal dynamics knowledge and without the measurement of disturbance values. The mentioned control forces the observed plant output to track the desired output value with the prespecified accuracy. In this paper simulation results produced by the practical tracking control algorithm on an electropneumatic piston drive will be presented.