Nonlinear adaptive torque control of electro-hydraulic load system with external active motion disturbance

Abstract This paper develops a high performance nonlinear adaptive control method for electro-hydraulic load simulator (EHLS). The tracking performance of EHLS is mainly affected by the following factors: actuator’s active motion disturbance, flow nonlinear and parametric uncertainties, etc. Most previous studies on EHLS pay too much attention on actuator’s active motion disturbance, while deemphasize the other two factors. This paper concerns EHLS as a motion loading system. Besides actuator’s motion disturbance, both the nonlinear characteristics and parametric uncertainties of the loading system are addressed by the present controller. First, the nonlinear model of EHLS is developed, and then a Lyapunov-based control algorithm augmented with parameters update law is developed using back-stepping design method. The stability of the developed control algorithm is proven via Lyapunov analysis. Both the co-simulation and experiment are performed to validate the effectiveness of the developed algorithm.