Experimental Validation of a Hydrostatic Transmission for Community Wind Turbines

Hydrostatic transmissions are commonly used in heavy-duty equipment for their design flexibility and superior power density. Compared to a conventional wind turbine transmission, a hydrostatic transmission (HST) is a lighter, more reliable, cheaper, continuously variable alternative for a wind turbine. In this paper, for the first time, a validated dynamical model and controlled experiment have been used to analyze the performance of a hydrostatic transmission with a fixed-displacement pump and a variable-displacement motor for community wind turbines. From the dynamics of the HST, a pressure control strategy is designed to maximize the power capture. A hardware-in-the-loop simulation is developed to experimentally validate the performance and efficiency of the HST drive train control in a 60 kW virtual wind turbine environment. The HST turbine is extensively evaluated under steady and time-varying wind on a state-of-the-art power regenerative hydrostatic dynamometer. The proposed controller tracks the optimal tip-speed ratio to maximize power capture.

MODERN TRENDS OF DESIGN, RESEARCH AND USE OF HYDRAULIC MACHINES IN DRIVES OF MECHANISMS AND TRANSMISSIONS (REVIEW ARTICLE)

The work is devoted to an overview of modern trends in the design, research and use of hydraulic machines in the drives of mechanisms and transmissions. The analysis of the use of hydromechanical transmissions has been carried out. The advantages and disadvantages of hydromechanical transmissions in comparison with mechanical ones are described. A brief overview of modern approaches to the design of new products, taking into account the existing information technologies, is carried out. We have analyzed modern software products designed to support the project at different stages of the product life cycle. It has been found that at the present time the appearance of individual variants of highly specialized software with a modern interface for synthesizing the structure of a designed product does not make it possible to solve the problems of synthesis and structural analysis of hydro-mechanical transmissions. A review of the analysis of operational factors affecting the fault tolerance and operating parameters of hydrostatic transmissions in general and hydromechanical transmission in particular is carried out. We have also considered the examples of technical solutions that allow to reduce the number of failures associated with the influence of one factor or another, as well as allow to reduce its influence on the parameters of the mechanism. The analysis of sources with information on the study of the parameters of hydrostatic transmissions using field tests or the mathematical apparatus developed by the authors is carried out. The ways of solving problems arising at the stages of design research are outlined. Keywords: design, hydrostatic transmission, hydromechanical transmission, influence of operational factors, synthesis

Advanced Design and Optimal Sizing of Hydrostatic Transmission Systems

This paper presents a novel method for designing and sizing high-efficient hydrostatic transmissions (HTs) for heavy duty propulsion applications such as agricultural and construction machinery. The proposed method consists in providing cost effective HT architectures that maximizes efficiency at the most frequent operating conditions of the transmission, as opposed to the traditional HT design methods based on the most demanding requirements of the system. The sizing method is based on a genetic optimization algorithm for calculating the optimal displacement of the main units of the HT to maximizes the efficiency in the most frequent operating conditions of the vehicle. A simulation model for HTs is built in MATLAB/Simulink® environment to test three different circuit alternatives for basic HTs. Considering a particular 250 kW heavy-duty application for which drive cycle data were available, this study shows great improvement in energy efficiency (14%) and power saving (20.1%) at frequent operating conditions while still achieving the corner power condition.

Application Study of Newton-Raphson-Type Nonlinear MPC for Hydrostatic Transmissions Under Disturbance and System Uncertainty

Model predictive control is well established and has a huge practical relevance in many industrial applications, especially for chemical or thermal plants. This paper presents the design and the implementation of a nonlinear model predictive control aiming at an accurate tracking control of desired output trajectories under disturbances and uncertainties for a nonlinear hydrostatic transmission system with multiple control inputs, which represents a fast mechatronic system. The benefit of this solution is that it can be easily adapted to either velocity tracking control or torque tracking control -- which is not the case with alternative model-based approaches. The control design is based on a numerical optimization within a moving horizon using the Newton-Raphson method in combination with the optimization-over-some variables technique. The unmeasurable system state variables as well as the system disturbances are reconstructed by an unscented Kalman filter which is well suited for nonlineaer systems subject to process and measurement noise. The proposed control scheme is investigated by simulations and experimentally validated on a test rig at the Chair of Mechatronics, University of Rostock. The results indicates the robustness of the proposed control structure by a high tracking accuracy despite system disturbances and uncertainties.