Robust Control for Static Loading of Electro-hydraulic Load Simulator with Friction Compensation

Load simulator is a key test equipment for aircraft actuation systems in hardware-in-the-loop-simulation. Static loading is an essential function of the load simulator and widely used in the static/dynamic stiffness test of aircraft actuation systems. The tracking performance of the static loading is studied in this paper. Firstly, the nonlinear mathematical models of the hydraulic load simulator are derived, and the feedback linearization method is employed to construct a feed-forward controller to improve the force tracking performance. Considering the effect of the friction, a LuGre model based friction compensation is synthesized, in which the unmeasurable state is estimated by a dual state observer via a controlled learning mechanism to guarantee that the estimation is bounded. The modeling errors are attenuated by a well-designed robust controller with a control accuracy measured by a design parameter. Employing the dual state observer is to capture the different effects of the unmeasured state and hence can improve the friction compensation accuracy. The tracking performance is summarized by a derived theorem. Experimental results are also obtained to verify the high performance nature of the proposed control strategy.