Abstract
This paper presents experimental studies on mechanical actuations of a pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM), which is driven by hydrogen gas based metal hydride (MH). The dynamic performances of hydrogen absorption/desorption, taking place within a MH reactor, are controlled via implementing cooling/heating effects of a thermoelectric module (TEM). Hydrogen pressure is applied as a driving force to commanding work outputs of the PAM as desired mechanical actuations. Due to strong inherent nonlinearity, a conventional proportional integral derivative (PID) control law is not capable of regulating thermodynamic variables of the HM reaction according to desired performances of the PAM. In this study, the fuzzy adaptive PID control is proposed in manipulating the MH reaction via the TEM. This viability of the proposed methodology is confirmed by the fact that the gains of PID control law are adapted by fuzzy rule-based tuning scheme at various operating conditions of the MH reactor. The experimental results show that the proposed control technique is much more effective than a PID control in both transient and steady state performances of the MH reactor for servo mechanical actuation of the PAM.
Highlights
Mechanical actuations of pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) are widely applied in many industrial applications, especially robotic fields such as humanoid, robotic hand [1,2,3,4]
The experimental rig is developed to investigate the dynamic performances of the PAM, which is driven by the gas pressure during hydrogen absorption/desorption of the metal hydride (MH) under pulling loads
The designed MH reactor coupled with the thermoelectric module (TEM) is of favorable effectiveness and compactness for hydrogen management and conversion
Summary
Mechanical actuations of pneumatic artificial muscle (PAM) are widely applied in many industrial applications, especially robotic fields such as humanoid, robotic hand [1,2,3,4]. A PAM actuator can perform mechanical work in different kinds of motions by consuming pneumatic energy, which is supplied by compressed air, stored in a tank, and/or supplied from a compressor [5, 6]. Those actuators cannot operate in the task, which requires compactness including high force/weight ratio, such as a rehabilitation application [7]. MH is capable of absorbing and desorbing large amounts of hydrogen gas [13] Those properties are very interesting in developing new advanced pneumatic actuators. MH has increasingly gained high potentials as hydrogen storages of pneumatic actuation systems [17,18,19]
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