Fractional-order PID control of hydraulic thrust system for tunneling boring machine

Abstract

The hydraulic thrust system is a major system of tunneling boring machine (TBM). It is known that the flow rate is dramatically fluctuant under conventional PID pressure control. At the same time the pressure is fluctuant when applying conventional PID flow rate control. Considering the dynamic performance of the hydraulic thrust system, we make use of fractional calculus which results in more satisfactory results. The fractional-order PID controller is adopted to control the hydraulic thrust system in this paper. The simulation is carried out with the AMESim software and the MATLAB/Simulink tool. The result shows that flow and pressure control using fractional-order PID controllers can reduce the flow rate and pressure fluctuation and make the flow rate and pressure track the set value faster. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.