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[pt] Sistemas hidráulicos são usados onde se requerem forças e torques relativamente altos, alta velocidade de resposta para o início, parada e reversão da velocidade. Eles são usados em sistemas industriais, em robótica, simuladores de movimento, plantas automatizadas, exploração de minérios, prensas, e especialmente em sistemas de testes de fadiga de materiais. As máquinas de testes de fadiga baseadas em sistemas servo-hidráulicos têm como propósito fazer ensaios nos materiais para prever a vida útil em serviço. Os ensaios de fadiga são quase sempre independentes da freqüência de trabalho. Para uma dada resistência do material e magnitudes das tensões alternadas e médias aplicadas, a vida à fadiga depende essencialmente do número de ciclos de carga aplicados ao material testado. Por esse motivo, trabalhar com a máquina de ensaios de materiais a uma freqüência elevada traz vantagens de redução de tempo e custo dos ensaios, sem interferir nos resultados. A aplicação da carga pode ser repetida milhões de vezes, em freqüências típicas de até cem vezes por segundo para metais. Para se atingirem estas freqüências, relativamente altas para um teste de fadiga, é necessário um sistema de controle eficiente. Nesta dissertação, técnicas de controle por aprendizado são desenvolvidas e aplicadas a uma máquina de ensaios de materiais, permitindo a aplicação de carregamentos de amplitude variável em alta freqüência. A metodologia proposta consiste em fazer um controle do tipo bang-bang, restringindo à servo-válvula do sistema a trabalhar sempre nos seus limites extremos de operação, i.e., procurando mantê-la sempre completamente aberta em uma ou outra direção. Devido à dinâmica do sistema, os pontos de reversão devem ficar antes dos picos e vales de força ou tensão desejada. O instante de reversão é um parâmetro que depende de diversos fatores, como a amplitude e carga média da solicitação, e também é influenciado por zonas mortas causadas, e.g., por folgas na fixação dos corpos de prova. Para que a servo-válvula trabalhe no limite de seu funcionamento, o algoritmo de aprendizado obtém os instantes ótimos para as reversões, associados a variáveis adimensionais com valores entre 0 e 1, armazenados em tabelas específicas para cada tipo de carregamento. A lei de aprendizado preenche e atualiza constantemente os valores das tabelas durante a execução dos testes, melhorando a resposta do sistema a cada evento. Apresentam-se a modelagem dinâmica de uma máquina servohidráulica e de sua malha de controle, e simulações comparando o controle PID com o controle por aprendizado proposto. A validação experimental é feita em uma máquina servo-hidráulica de ensaios de fadiga. Para este fim, um software de controle em tempo real foi especialmente desenvolvido e implementado em um sistema computacional CompactRIO. Os resultados demonstram a eficiência da metodologia proposta. / [en] Hydraulic systems are used where relatively high forces and torques are required, or when high response speeds are necessary. They are used in industrial systems, robotics, movement simulators, automated plants, ore exploration, presses, and especially in fatigue testing systems. Fatigue tests are usually performed on servo-hydraulic systems, in order to predict the behavior of materials and their life in service. Fatigue tests are almost always independent of the loading frequency. For a given material and magnitudes of alternate and mean stresses, the fatigue life depends essentially on the number of applied load cycles on the tested material. For this reason, working with the material testing machine at high frequencies brings the advantages of reduction in time and cost, without altering the results. The application of the load can be repeated millions of times, in frequencies of up to one hundred times per second for metals, or even more. To achieve such frequencies, relatively high for a fatigue test, it is necessary to use an efficient control system. In this thesis, learning control techniques are developed and applied to a materials testing machine, allowing the application of constant or variable amplitude loads in high frequency. The proposed methodology consists of implementing a bang-bang type control, restricting the system servo-valve to always work at its extreme limits of operation, i.e., always keeping it completely open in one or the other direction. Due to the system dynamics, the reversion instant must happen before achieving the peaks and valleys of desired force (or stress, strain, etc.). The reversion instant is a parameter that depends on several factors, such as the alternate and mean loading components. It is also influenced by dead zones caused, e.g., by the slack in the mounting between a CTS specimen and the machine pins. As the servo-valve works in its limits of operation, the learning algorithm tries to obtain the optimal instants for the reversions, associating them to a non dimensional variable with values between 0 and 1, stored in specific tables. The learning law constantly updates the values of the table during the execution of the tests, improving the system response. In this work, the dynamic modeling of a servo-hydraulic machine is presented, together with its control scheme. Simulations are performed to compare results from PID and learning controls. The experimental validation is made using a servohydraulic testing machine. For this purpose, real time control software is developed and implemented in a CompactRIO computational system. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology.

Milling is a widely used cutting process, most commonly applied to machining external surfaces of workpieces. When machining operations are required within hard to reach areas of components, or deep within the bore of components, alternative methods of metal removal are generally employed. Typically when milling at extended reaches, difficulties may increase exponentially when trying to achieve distances several meters into a component. Essentially every topic of the milling process becomes difficult and more convoluted. Firstly to generate a stable cutting condition, and ultimately for an operator to be able to understand the cutting conditions, when all normal senses to interpret the machining stability are removed. The aim for the research is, to enable the operation of high slenderness ratio internal milling operations to become a viable technology, by detailing the measures required, to obtain a stable cutting condition. The process needs to be monitored for degradation of the tooling due to wear, and to prevent catastrophic machine damage from tool breakage or machine component failure. This research addresses the lack of knowledge available for milling with extended reaches, and the knowledge gained to overcome the real difficulties that exist for this process. Initial experiments are conducted on a prototype machine to gain experience of the internal machining operation and the many issues that it faced. Establishing requirements of the process via investigation of the tooling and necessary auxiliary equipment, it becomes possible to consider countermeasures to address the errors generated by torsional twisting of the milling arm. A system for applying a counter torque to reduce torsional deflection errors has been employed to successfully reduce the unavoidable issue over such long distances. For the process to become manageable for an industrial operator without a high level of specialist knowledge, the application of tool condition monitoring (TCM) and process condition monitoring (PCM) had to be applied. This addresses a void in available literature and research with respect to internal machining, and enables the process to become practical for an industrial environment. For this reason the research project will concentrate on the application of TCM and PCM onto the machining system. The completion of the research resulted in the process becoming satisfyingly stable, and with a resulting accuracy that satisfies the requirements of the component. Performance of the final system rivalled or achieved better results than had been experienced by the project sponsor.

L'évolution vers les avions plus électriques engendre des efforts importants pour développer des actionneurs à source de puissance électrique pour les commandes de vol. Pour de telles applications critiques, il est peut être intéressant dans le futur d'associer à une même surface de contrôle un actionneur conventionnel à source de puissance hydraulique et un actionneur à source de puissance électrique mais ceci pose un problème important lorsque les deux actionneurs sont actifs simultanément: comme chacun essaye d'imposer sa position à l'autre,les deux actionneurs luttent l'un contre l'autre en développant des efforts néfastes qui ne sont pas utilisés par la charge. L'objet du présent travail est de proposer des stratégies d’égalisation d’effort pour un système d'actionnement impliquant ces deux types d''actionneurs opérant en mode actif-actif. La première étape est de concevoir leur commande en position et de la valider sur banc d'essai. Un banc d'essai virtuel fidèle à la réalité est ensuite réalisé dans l'environnement de simulation AMESim pour pouvoir évaluer facilement les différentes stratégies d'égalisation d'effort entre les deux actionneurs. Ces stratégies sont proposées et évaluées virtuellement en deux étapes, statique puis dynamique. Pour finir, une étude de robustesse est réalisée a posteriori pour évaluer la sensibilité des indicateurs de performance aux incertitudes sur les modèles de simulation et sur les points et les conditions de fonctionnement. / On the way to more electric aircraft (MEA), more and more power-by-wire (PBW) actuators are involved in the flight control system. For a hybrid redundant actuation system composed by the conventional hydraulically powered actuators and the PBW actuators, one major issue while they operate on active/active mode is the force fighting between channels. As the grave influence of force fighting on accelerating material fatigue and increasing power consumption,it must be addressed with attention. This thesis was aiming at proposing some effective force equalization control strategies for the hybrid actuation system involving one servo-hydraulic actuator (SHA) and one electro-mechanical actuator (EMA). For this objective, the position controllers for SHA and EMA were designed and validated as a first step. Then, a virtual test bench regarding to the realistic behaviors was built in the AMESim simulation environment to accelerate the controller design and enable the robustness study. Following this, 2 static force equalization control strategies were proposed and experimentally validated. The first strategy hat introduced integral force fighting signal to compensate the actuator position control was proved a good candidate solution. In the next part, 3 dynamic force equalization strategies were proposed and assessed on the virtual test bench. Their performance sensitivities to the parameter uncertainties were studied through Monte-Carlo method. The first strategy that introduced velocity and acceleration feed-forwards to force the SHA and EMA having similar pursuit dynamics showed a good force equalization performance as well as good segregation and good robustness. In the end, the work presented in thesis was concluded and perspective was given to the ongoing work.

Vibration testing of structures constitutes a crucial step in design and commissioning of engineering structures. The focus here is on simulating field conditions in a laboratory so that detailed investigations of the structural behavior under various future load scenarios can be carried out. A major enabling technology in recent years in this field of study, especially, in the context of earthquake engineering, and automotive testing, has been the development of servo-hydraulic actuation systems, which form the principal component of test facilities, such as, multi-axes shake tables for testing building structures under earthquake loads, multi-post testrigs for testing vehicles subjected to road loads, and reaction-wall based test systems for simulating horizontal effects of earthquake loads on building structures. These systems have enabled the conduct of systematic studies on simulation of nonlinear structures under transient loads, simulation of multi-component and spatially varying random loads, and combining numerical and experimental methods with a view to avoid scaling while testing small scale critical components of large built-up structures. The investigations reported in this thesis are in this area of research and are primarily aimed at exploring the potential of servo-hydraulic test systems to address a few intricate issues related to performance assessment of engineering vibrating systems. A broad-based overview of goals of experimental approaches in vibration engineering, including dynamic system characterization and performance assessment, is presented in Chapter 1. Also discussed are the brief details of vibration testing methods developed in the context of earthquake engineering (including quasi-static test, effective force test, shake table test, combined effective force and shake table test, various versions of pseudo-dynamic test, and real-time substructuring) and automotive vehicle testing (including input excitation based methods and response based methods). The discussion notes the remarkable success witnessed in combining mathematical methods and experimental techniques especially in problems of characterization of dynamic system properties. Similar success, however, is observed to be not wide-spread in the context of development of test methods aimed at performance assessment of vibrating systems. The review culminates with the identification of the following three problems to be tackled in the present thesis: (a) development of efficient experimental procedures to estimate time varying reliability of structures under multi-component earthquake loads and similar analysis of vehicle structures under spatially varying random road loads; the focus here is on achieving sampling variance reduction in estimating the reliability; (b) development of experimental procedures to determine optimal cross-power spectral density models of partially specified multi-component random loads so as to produce the highest and lowest response variance in a specified response variable; the focus here is on seismic tests of asymmetric structures under partially specified multi-component earthquake loads, and on characterizing optimal correlations between two parallel tracks which maximize or minimize the vehicle response; and (c) development of a modified pseudo-dynamic test procedure, to incorporate additional components in numerical and experimental modeling in terms of an augmented linearized variational equation, so as to assess and contain propagation of numerical and experimental errors. The subsequent three chapters of the thesis tackle these questions and in doing so the thesis makes the following contributions: (A) Inspired by the Girsanov transformation based Monte Carlo simulation method for estimating time-variant component reliability of vibrating systems, an experimental test procedure, which incorporates the Girsanov transformation step into its folds, has been developed to estimate the time-variant system reliability of engineering systems. The two main ingredients of application of this strategy consists of determination of a control vector, which is artificially introduced to facilitate reduction in sampling variance, and the formulation of the Radon-Nikodym derivative, which serves as the correction to be introduced in order to compensate for the addition of the artificial control. (B) In problems of response analysis of structures subjected to random earthquake loads and vibration of vehicles running on rough roads, it may not be always feasible to completely specify the external actions on the structures. In such situations, it is of interest to determine the most favorable and the least favorable responses, along with the models for missing information in the inputs which produce the extreme responses. The present study, again inspired by existing analytical solutions to this problem, develops an experimental procedure to characterize the optimal excitation models and associated responses. (C) In the context of PsD testing of nonlinear structure to earthquake loads, a refinement in the test procedure involving the treatment of a linearized variational equation is proposed. This has led to the estimation of the evolution of global error norm as test proceeds with time. The estimates of error thus obtained have been used to decide upon altering the time step of integration.

Already since some time, Bosch Rexroth offers solutions as compact servo hydraulic actuators (SHA). Because there are lot of requests from the market, we thought about reducing the inquiry processing time and delivery time by designing a kit system for the SHA solutions. This system should be flexible enough to cover different technical solutions (e.g. cylinder), functionalities and design styles [... aus dem Text]

[pt] Nesta dissertação foram desenvolvidas técnicas de controle por aprendizado acelerado e Neuro-Fuzzy, aplicadas em um sistema servo-hidráulico para ensaio de fadiga. Este sistema tem o propósito de fazer ensaios em materiais para prever a resistência à fadiga dos materiais. O trabalho envolveu quatro etapas principais: levantamento bibliográfico, desenvolvimento de um controle por aprendizado acelerado, desenvolvimento de um controle por aprendizado Neuro-Fuzzy, e implementação experimental dos modelos de controle por aprendizado proposto em uma máquina de ensaios de materiais. A implementação do controle por aprendizado acelerado foi feita a partir do modelo de controle desenvolvido por Alva, com o objetivo de acelerar o processo de aprendizagem. Esta metodologia consiste em fazer um controle do tipo bang-bang, restringindo a servo-válvula a trabalhar sempre em seus limites extremos de operação, i.e., procurando mantê-la sempre completamente aberta em uma ou outra direção. Para manter a servo-válvula trabalhando em seus limites de seu funcionamento, os instantes ótimos para as reversões são obtidos pelo algoritmo de aprendizado, e armazenados em tabelas específicas para cada tipo de carregamento. Estes pontos de reversão dependem de diversos fatores, como a amplitude e carga média da solicitação, e são influenciados pela dinâmica do sistema. Na metodologia proposta, a lei de aprendizado inclui um termo de momentum que permite acelerar a aprendizagem dos valores das tabelas constantemente durante a execução dos testes, melhorando a resposta a cada evento. O desenvolvimento de um controle por aprendizado Neuro-Fuzzy foi motivado pela necessidade de ter um agente com a capacidade de aprendizado e armazenamento dos pontos ótimos de reversão. Este modelo de controle também consiste na implementação de um controle do tipo bang-bang, trabalhando com a servo-válvula sempre nos seus limites extremos de operação. O instante de reversão é determinado pelo sistema Neuro-Fuzzy, o qual tem como entradas a gama (dobro da amplitude) e o valor mínimo do carregamento solicitado. O processo de aprendizado é feito pelas atualizações dos pesos do sistema Neuro-Fuzzy, baseado nos erros obtidos durante a execução dos testes, melhorando a resposta do sistema a cada evento. A validação experimental dos modelos propostos é feita em uma máquina servohidráulica de ensaios de fadiga. Para este fim, o algoritmo de controle proposto foi implementado em tempo real em um módulo de controle CompactRIO da National Instruments. Os testes efetuados demonstraram a eficiência da metodologia proposta. / [en] In this thesis, accelerated learning and Neuro-Fuzzy control techniques were developed and applied to a servo-hydraulic system used in fatigue tests. This work involved four main stages: literature review, development of an accelerated learning control, development of a Neuro-Fuzzy control, and implementation of the learning control models into a fatigue testing machine. The accelerated learning control was implemented based on a learning control developed in previous works, introducing a faster learning law. Both learning control methodologies consist on implementing a bang-bang control, forcing the servovalve to always work in its operational limits. As the servo-valve works in its operational limits, the reversion points to achieve every peak or valley in the desired history are obtained by the learning algorithm, and stored in a specific table for each combination of minimum and mean load. The servo-valve reversion points depend on a few factors, such as alternate and mean loading components, while they are as well influenced by the system dynamics. In the proposed accelerated methodology, the learning law includes one momentum term that allows to speed up the learning process of the table cell values during the execution of the tests. The developed Neuro-Fuzzy control also consists on a bang-bang control, making the servo-valve work in its operational limits. However, here the instant of each reversion is determined by the Neuro-Fuzzy system, which has the load range and minimum load required as inputs. The learning process is made by the update of the Neuro-Fuzzy system weights, based on the errors obtained during the execution of the test.The experimental validation of the proposed models was made using a servo-hydraulic testing machine. The control algorithm was implemented in real time in a C-RIO computational system. The tests demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed methodology.