This thesis is concerned with the study of position control of the electro-hydraulic servo indexing system in a flexible forging machine and inertia load simulator. The role of an Electro-hydraulic servo indexing system is to rotate a workpiece fast and accurately to a desired position. Since the inertia of a workpiece changes during each forging step, an adaptive control scheme could be adopted to the position control of the workpiece. A generalized predictive control method which depends on predicting the plant output over several steps ahead based on the assumptions about future control actions is proposed. The perormance of proposed GPC algorithm is investigated experimentally and compared with that of PID control. Experimental results show that the proposed GPC algorithm is satisfactory for the position control of the workpiece of an electrohydraulic indexing system.
In addition to the position control of electrohydraulic indexing system, theoretical and experimental study of inertia load simulator is also presented.
