engleski

Teaching control using mechatronic systems with pneumatic drive

The paper presents several experimental systems with pneumatic drive, which have been designed as test models in the field of fluid power systems and feedback control education of mechanical engineering students. Feedback control is one of the most theoretical and mathematically complex engineering subjects and therefore it is of particular importance to demonstrate such abstract concepts using familiar, but interesting physical systems. The paper first reviews different strategies to control the position of pneumatic actuator using various types of valves such as: proportional directional control valves, proportional pressure valves and on-off solenoid valves. Then the paper focuses on three balancing mechanisms driven by pneumatics which are used as experimental systems for the explanation of the effectiveness of advanced control techniques. These balancing mechanisms are the inverted pendulum, the inverted wedge and the ball and beam system, that fall into a category of unstable systems with highly nonlinear dynamics, under- actuated, multivariable systems with non-minimum phase characteristic. The particularity of these balancing mechanisms is their pneumatic drive, which makes them more interesting for education and offers great opportunities to learn design in a mechatronic way. The final section of the article presents an experimental system with pneumatic muscles as actuators that enable some new features of the controlled systems. The paper is accompanied with the typical experimental results obtained during the testing process.

pneumatic drive; balancing mechanism; fluidic muscle; experiment

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