Development of electro-hydraulic proportion control system of track-laying machinery for high speed railway construction
Introduction
The track-laying machinery (TLM) is a kind of large-scale full automatic continuous track-laying work machinery in high speed railway construction, and it is characterized by the cooperation of the complicated and networked mechatronic systems. In general, the train operating speed of high speed railway is over 200 km/h. The common rail-sleeper raft TLM used in the low speed railway construction is only a simple mobile gantry, and its work mode is serial. Different from the common rail-sleeper raft TLM, TLM used in high speed railway construction is supposed to lay 500 m long tracks and sleepers under continuous and coordinated working mode. This kind of TLM plays the important role during the construction process of the high speed railway. The constitution and configuration of TLM are shown in Fig. 1. It is mainly composed of crawler vehicle, wheel-rail operation vehicle, sleeper-conveying gantry crane, sleeper-transporting chains, hydraulic system and manipulation control system. In the TLM, traction drive, sleeper-conveying and sleeper-laying systems are three important subsystems. These three subsystems are responsible for completing travel driving, conveying sleeper and laying sleeper respectively, and their performance and cooperation will directly determine the operation performance of the overall TLM. Because TLM is of gigantic vehicle size, and distributed numerous actuator mechanisms, controllers and sensors arrangement, a real time of distributed control and measurement based on CAN bus is adopted to realize measurement and synthesis control. With the fast development of high speed railway, the higher automation level, the higher operation quality, efficiency and reliability are desired during the construction process. Thus, the control system of TLM is expected to design as a physical information system with flow process work features to achieve the more flexible manipulation and more excellent synthesis control ability. Therefore, the motion synthesis and coordinated control of multi-hydraulic-actuator in TLM under network framework is a challenge problem to be imperatively solved.
As shown in Fig. 1, TLM mainly consists of the crawler vehicle and wheel-rail vehicle. The crawler vehicle is the front supporting and guiding mechanism of the wheel-rail vehicle when the TLM is in the operating state, in the mean time, it can also provide the auxiliary driving force when the traction force of the wheel-rail vehicle can't meet the requirement of the traction force. The two vehicles are hinged by swing bearing, and they are respectively driven by two separate pump-controlled motor volumetric speed systems. Compared with valve-control hydraulic actuating system [1], pump-controlled-motor system has the advantages of high transmission efficiency and large power [2], [3], [4], and the response speed of the system is also acceptable for the travelling system with large power and large load. In comparison, because of good control accuracy and fast responses, hydraulic valve-controlled systems are often employed to position control and speed control, and the issue of low efficiency is solved by load-sensing flowrate control. Yin et al. [1], [2], [3], [4] studied respectively valve-controlled loading [1] for pitch system simulating of wind turbines and the pump-controlled pitch system for pitch system [2], [3], [4], and also the corresponding control methods were proposed. For the TLM traction driving, we focus on the issue of traction travelling synchronization. Because the vehicle body is very long and large, the slipping phenomenon will happen when the driving speed of each wheel is different. Therefore the speed synchronization between the two vehicles and among multiple motors in the hydraulic systems of two vehicles must be guaranteed for keeping the sufficient traction force and anti-sliding.
The working devices of TLM contain the sleeper-conveying system and the sleeper-laying mechanism, and their constitution diagram is shown in Fig. 2. The sleeper-conveying system contains three horizontal chains and a vertical chain. When the track-laying machinery travels ahead, the sleeper-laying work is conducted in cooperation with TLM. In order to realize the smooth and uniform sleeper-transmitting work, and to avoid sleepers being piled or lacked on the three horizontal chains, it must be guaranteed that sleeper-conveying speeds among three sleeper-conveying chains are synchronized with sleeper-receiving speed of the vertical chain, meantime the matching with the vehicle speed is also very necessary. In the practical operation, sleepers are piled on No.3 chain in group by the sleeper-conveying gantry crane, which will inevitably cause large intermittent load disturbance to No.3 chain. In order to execute the continuous sleeper-laying operation, firstly, the sleeper spacing is demanded to be gradually increased by the order from No.1 chain to No.3 chain, thus the robust control and coordinated speed control for multiple sleeper-conveying motors are necessary; secondly, the operation motions in the sleeper-transmitting and sleeper-laying process are continuous and coordinated. Due to the differences among the driving motors and sleeper-conveying chains in actual operation, it is very difficult to realize the coordinated speed control. Therefore, the coordinated control for traction drive and sleeper-laying work has become a pivotal problem in the research on the control system of Track-laying machinery.
The steering of the track-laying machinery is realized by controlling the extending and contracting of the steering hydraulic cylinder based on the relative deflection of the crawler vehicle to the wheel-rail vehicle. The automatic steering control is accomplished by detecting the path deviation of the crawler vehicle and regulating the steering angle of the crawler vehicle. The steering control will not be discussed in this paper.
Traction drive of TLM is similar to the chassis control of the vehicle. The relevant researches on coordinated synchronization for traction drive of the chassis were made. Mokhiamar and Abe studied the cooperative chassis control of four-wheel drive car, and an optimal tire force distribution method was proposed [5]. Anwar [6] researched the generalized predictive control of the yaw system of the vehicle with hybrid brake by wire. Bachinger et al. [7] carried out the modeling and simulation of drive train in the vehicle. Addressed the traction travelling synchronization problem of the Track-laying machinery, Gan [8] used the flow equilibrium technology to synchronize four motors of the crawler vehicle, and synchronous flow-dividing with electronic antiskid was employed to the wheel-rail traction system. However, because the mathematical model of the system is simplified as a single variable pump and fixed displacement motor, it can't analyze the implementation effect of the synchronization control strategy. Meanwhile, for the proposed synchronization problem between crawler traction and wheel-rail traction, the related research report has been not seen yet. Although the forced synchronization via flow-divider valve can reach some extent synchronization, the temperature rising to be caused by thermal power loss of the system will affect the synchronization effect.
At present, the researches on the control for large-scale construction machineries mainly focused on travelling system [9], [10], steering system [9], [10], [11] and network-based coordinated motion control [11], [12], [13]. However, researches associated with coordinated synchronization network control for conveying sleepers, matching speeds between laying sleeper and vehicle travelling in the track-laying machinery have been not found yet. Classical synchronization control methods mainly include the synchronized master command mode, the master-slave synchronized mode and the cross-coupling synchronized mode, and they have been used to the coordination of transmission control systems. Lorenz et al. [14] incorporated the synchronized master command approach and the master-slaved approach in CNC controllers used for multiple axes synchronously driven. Karpenko et al. [15] proposed a decentralized coordinated motion control approach to be used to two hydraulic actuators handling a common object. Yang et al. [16] designed a control law to realize the synchronization between cylinders of the hydraulic thrust system in the shield tunneling machine by using master-slave PID. Heertjes et al. [17] realized synchronization of high-precision stage systems by master-slave control based on self-tuning. Mi et al. [18] studied the coordinated multi-cylinder movement of the jacked box tunneling by combining synchronized master command approach with master-slave method. Ouyang et al. [19] studied the application of the cross-coupled control in multi-axis contour tracking. Meng et al. [20], [21] combined the cross-coupling technology with the adaptive robust control architecture to synchronize dual-cylinder or multi-axis. A cross-coupled control based on the second order sliding mode controller was designed to provide motion synchronization in the multi-agent system [22], [23]. Li and Liu [24] presented an online fuzzy logic (FL) self-motion planner and an adaptive neural-fuzzy controller (ANFC) used to control a redundant nonholonomic mobile modular manipulator. Perez-Pinal et al. [25] proposed a relative coupling strategy scheme in 2003. Perez-Pinal et al. [26] analyzed five synchronization techniques and presented that the relative coupling technique can offer the best performance. However, due to the large external disturbance and serious nonlinearity in the TLM hydraulic systems, there are still many problems to be resolved.
The contributions of the paper are as follows: firstly, for the traction drive system, the compound synchronized control approach is employed to speed coordinated synchronization of the crawler vehicle and the wheel-rail vehicle, the antiskid synchronization is applied to multiple driving shafts of the wheel-rail vehicle; secondly, for the multi-conveying-chain system subjected to varying load, the relative coupling coordinated control for its speed is used based on the threshold type fuzzy PID; thirdly, for speed matching between vehicle travelling and sleeper-conveying, sleeper-laying, the working flowchart control based on measured wheel triggering speed and timing sequence is applied.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the constitution, working principle, and problem formulation of the traction drive system and the sleeper-conveying system. Section 3 describes modeling of pump-controlled motor in travelling system and valve-controlled motor in sleeper-laying system. The coordinated synchronization control strategies, simulation analyses, prototype test and actual application of the two systems are carried out in Section 4. Finally, main conclusions are summarized in Section 5.
Section snippets
Traction drive system
The traction drive of TLM contains two articulated wheel-rail work vehicle and crawler vehicle. The former consists of three power bogies, and the latter consists of two traction crawlers and three power bogies. The hydraulic travelling system of TLM is shown in Fig. 3. The wheel-rail working vehicle travels on the laid railway, and the crawler vehicle travels on the ballast bed. The crawler pump and wheel-rail pump are driven by the same shaft of the diesel engine. The displacement of the
Mathematical model of the traction drive subsystem
The traction drive subsystem is a parallel drive system with two variable displacement pumps, where one variable pump controls six variable motors and the other one controls two variable motors. For each pump-controlled-motor system, according to the variable pump characteristic curve and hydraulic control theory, we can write the mathematical model of the displacement Vgp of the variable pump as follows where Vgmaxp is the maximum pump displacement; Ibp and Iap
Coordinated synchronization control for traction drive system and multiple sleeper-conveying chains
In order to make TLM meet the track-laying operation requirement, the allowable range of the performance indexes of the TLM should be firstly determined. The traction force error between the crawler vehicle and the wheel-rail vehicle is no more than 10%. For the sleeper-laying precision, the allowable error range of sleeper spacing is ±5 mm, the maximum accumulated error of continuous six sleepers is ±20 mm, and the permissible error referring to center line of cross section is ±10 mm. The
Conclusions
This paper has studied the key technologies of the traction drive system and the sleeper-laying operation system in the track-laying machinery. The mathematical models and control laws of pump-controlled motor travelling system and valve-controlled motor sleeper-conveying system have been established and designed. The synchronized master command coordinated synchronization for the crawler vehicle and the wheel-rail vehicle, electronic antiskid synchronization for multiple driving shafts and
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by National Key Basic Research Program of China under Grant No. 2014CB046403, Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 51475019, and Collaborative Innovation Center of Water Resources Efficient Utilization and Guarantee Engineering of Henan Province in China.
References (26)
- et al.
Reproduction of five degree-of-freedom loads for wind turbine using equispaced electro-hydraulic actuators
Renew Energy
(2015) - et al.
Design, modeling and implementation of a novel pitch angle control system for wind turbine
Renew Energy
(2015) - et al.
Adaptive sliding mode back-stepping pitch angle control of a variable-displacement pump controlled pitch system for wind turbines
ISA Trans
(2015) - et al.
How the four wheels should share forces in an optimum cooperative chassis control
Control Eng Pract
(2006) Generalized predictive control of yaw dynamics of a hybrid brake-by-wire equipped vehicle
Mechatronics
(2005)- et al.
A novel drivetrain modelling approach for real-time simulation
Mechatronics
(2015) - et al.
Design of robust sliding mode control with disturbance observer for multi-axis coordinated traveling system
Comput Math Appl
(2012) - et al.
Self-tuning in master-slave synchronization of high-precision stage systems
Control Eng Pract
(2013) - et al.
An electro-hydraulic system for synchronously jacked box tunneling in shallow saturated soft soil cover
Autom Constr
(2012) - et al.
Motion synchronization in unmanned aircrafts formation control with communication delays
Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simul
(2013)
Integrated pitch control for wind turbine based on a novel pitch control system
J Renew Sustain Energy
Research on speed control system of traction travelling mechanism of track-laying machinery
Network-based coordinated motion control of large-scale transportation vehicles
IEEE-ASME Trans Mechatron
Cited by (4)
-
Chemotherapeutic Role of Polyphenols Present in Ocimum sanctum
2022, Anti-Cancer Agents in Medicinal Chemistry -
Active disturbance rejection position synchronous control of dual-hydraulic actuators with unknown dead-zones
2020, Sensors (Switzerland) -
PC-based control and simulation of an electro-hydraulic system
2017, Computer Applications in Engineering Education