Leakage Based Condition Monitoring and Pressure Control of the Swashplate Axial Piston Pump

Abstract

Abstract This research mainly focused on the axial piston variable displacement pump, which is the most important part of the fluid power system. The variable displacement axial piston has been found as versatile and flexible for electro-hydraulic applications. Heavy industries such as automobile, aircraft, and mining use an axial piston pump due to its high power to weight ratio, continuous variable power transmission, low inertia, self-lubricating properties, and good controllability. The main challenges with the hydraulic system are highly nonlinear, leakages, unknown external disturbance, etc. The mathematical model of the variable displacement pump along with swashplate control has been developed. The model is used to identify the pump health condition with pressure and flow measurement, i.e., ripple pattern. The pressure and flow ripple will vary from the regular pattern due to wear and tear, i.e., increased leakage flow. The main source of the increase in leakage flow is due to wear in piston and cylinder bore. The piston chamber pressure, kinematical flow, and discharge area model of the pump has been validated with the existing results. The pump pressure control is very much essential for the enhancement of the performance of the electro-hydraulic system. In the present study, a conventional PID controller has been used as a backup to maintain system performance within the permissible faults. The electro-hydraulic system has been employed for swash-plate control of the pump to obtain desire pressure flow at the exit of the pump. MATLAB Simulink has been used for the simulation study of the pump.