The spool displacement of directional control valve can be considered as the standard signal to measure the bandwidth frequency of a directional control valve. When the spool displacement is not available, the metering-orifice system is implemented in this research as an alternative way of measuring the 90 degrees phase bandwidth frequency of the hydraulic directional control valve. The inertia effect on the transmission line oil induces the phase lead of the valve load pressure when compared with the phase of spool displacement. The capacitance effect of the oil induces the phase lag of the valve load pressure. The phase of the load pressure can be adjusted to be the same as that of the spool displacement by controlling the opening area of the metering orifice. A series of experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the metering orifice. The 90 degrees phase bandwidth frequency measured from the valve load pressure was significantly deviated in some cases from the frequency of the spool displacement. The metering orifice was hard to be applied to measure the -90 degrees phase bandwidth frequency of the high precision.

The hydraulic cylinder seals are used not only to protect leakage of the working fluids but also to prevent incoming of foreign particles into the system. Chromium plating is generally applied to improve corrosion and wear resistance. It has been noticed that sealing surface damage occurs due to the hard foreign/wear particles contained in the hydraulic oil. In this study, a three-bodied sliding contact problem related with a PTFE seal, a spherical particle and chrome-plated steel substrate is modeled to investigate the relations to wear mechanism. Using the nonlinear finite element software, MARC/MENTAT, the deformed shapes, the von Mises and first principal stress distributions with plating thickness were compared. The sealing surface was mainly abraded by hard particles embedded in the seal. The plastic deformation of the steel substrate decreased with thicker plating. Hence it could be more effective to coat the sealing surface of a hydraulic cylinder with a hard material such as TiN, TiC and DLC.

Hydraulic torque load simulator is essential to test and qualify the performance of various angle control systems. Typically a flapper-type second stage servovalve is applied to the load simulator, but here the direct drive servovalve, which is a kind of one-stage valve and affected by the large flow force, is applied. Since the torque load is applied not to the stationary shaft but to the rotating shaft of the angle control system, the controlled torque of load simulator is not accurate due to the rotating speed of the angle control system. A feedforward compensator is designed and applied to minimize the disturbance-like effect. A mathematical model is derived and linearized to analyze the stability, accuracy and responsiveness of the torque load simulator. The parameter effects of a controller, servovalve, hydraulic motor, rotating spring shaft are analyzed and summarized. The goodness of the linear analysis is verified by the digital computer simulations using both the linear and nonlinear mathematical models.

When the wind speed rises above the rated wind speed, the produced power of the wind turbines exceeds the rated power. Even more, the excessive power results in the undesirable mechanical load and fatigue. A solution to this problem is pitch control of the wind turbines. This paper presents a systematic design method of a collective pitch controller for the wind turbines using a discrete fuzzy Proportional-Integral (PI) controller. Unlike conventional PI controllers, the fuzzy PI controller has variable gains according to its input variables. Generally, tuning the parameters of fuzzy PI controller is complex due to the presence of too many parameters strongly coupled. In this paper, a systematic method for the fuzzy PI controller is presented. First, we show the fact that the fuzzy PI controller is a superset of the PI controller in the discrete-time domain and the initial parameters of the fuzzy PI controller is selected by using this relationship. Second, for simplicity of the design, we use only four rules to construct nonlinear fuzzy control surface. The tuning parameters of the proposed fuzzy PI controller are also obtained by the aforementioned relationship between the PI controller and the fuzzy PI controller. As a result, unlike the PI controller, the proposed fuzzy PI controller has variable gains which allow the pitch control system to operate in broader operating regions. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified with computer simulations using FAST, a NREL's primary computer-aided engineering tool for horizontal axis wind turbines.

This research describes the development model and testing of a hybrid damper which can be applicable to a vehicle suspension. The hybrid damper is devised to improve the performance of a conventional passive oil damper using a magneto-rheological (MR) accumulator which consists of a gas accumulator and a MR device. The level of damping is continuously variable by the means of control in the applied current in a MR device fitted to a floating piston which separates the gas and the oil chamber. A simple MR device is used to resist the movement of floating piston. At first a mathematical model which describes all flows within the conventional oil damper is formulated, and then a small MR device is also devised and adopted to a mathematical model to characterize the performance of the device.