A nonlinear hysteresis compensation control of hydro-viscous drive in air transport operations

The Hydro-Viscous Drive (HVD) speed regulating system finds extensive application in air transport transmission systems to regulate the stepless speed or conduct overload protection. However, its intrinsic hysteretic behaviors, such as the asymmetric hysteretic and dead zone, could introduce inaccuracy and delay in control applications, posing challenges to system regulation. This paper investigates a Nonlinear Hysteresis Compensation Control (NHCC) that consists of two parts to control the HVD output speed by operating the valve under different engine operating conditions. In the first part, the Inverse Hysteresis Compensator (IHC) based on major loop data is introduced for the asymmetric hysteresis characterization and compensation of the HVD speed control system of the power generation and distribution, which aims to reduce the hysteresis and dead zone effect and expand the effective input range. In the second part, the Active Disturbance Rejection Controller (ADRC) is employed to mitigate the hysteresis effects of the compensated system and remove the steady-state error, which allows real-time compensation of the estimated perturbations as state feedback to achieve the required performance. An experimental laboratory station has been fabricated to evaluate the proposed method. The test results show that the NHCC method can regulate the fan speed to the desired value (|e| 45 r/min at steady state) and broaden the effective input range to the full range under different engine conditions. Besides, the proposed control method can reduce the non-linearity of the input and output curves (from 18% to 4%) and compensate for the asymmetric hysteresis (from 38% to 5%).