Guidelines for Properly Adjustning Pressure Feedback in Systems with Over-Centre Valves

Many mobile hydraulic systems are fitted with over centre valves for safety measures. However, it is well known that over centre valves in combination with pressure compensated flow control valves may lead to oscillatory and even unstable system behaviour. The traditional solution to overcome this problem is to use an over centre valve with a sufficiently low pilot ratio and/or include various damping orifices in the system. Both of these solutions are energy consuming and may decrease the control performance. An alternative approach is to use (electronic) pressure feedback — also referred to as active damping — to stabilise the system and damp pressure pulsations. This is not a new method, but the effect and adjustment of the filters is often misunderstood leading to incorrectly adjusted filters and degraded system performance. The focus of the current paper is therefore to explain and derive a set of guidelines for how to properly adjust a standard pressure feedback in system with an over centre valve when also considering model uncertainties, un-modelled dynamics and parameter variations.
The paper takes its basis in a standard cylinder drive with an inertia load, over centre valve and a pressure compensated proportional valve. Based on a linearized model of the system, the system is analysed and it is shown that there is an optimal range for both the filter frequency and gain, which are closely linked. It is furthermore shown that these both closely affect the obtainable damping and dynamic response of the system. From the analysis a set of guidelines are derived for how to properly adjust the filter coefficients and the effect of different filter adjustments are shown and commented for the example system.