Design and Development of Fuzzy Control of Nitinol-Hydraulic Valve

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for design and control of a new servo valve which has variety of applications such as in vehicle active suspension system. The new setup which is referred to as Nitinol- hydraulic actuator consists of a smart spool rod covered by smart materials for operating position assigning of inlet and outlet ports. Inter-metallic compound of Nitinol (Ni-Ti) is used for actuator and valve design. A specific control scheme is exploited for parameter analysis and the setup is modeled in control space. The effort is made to tackle the conventional difficulties due to uncertainties and nonlinearities in force control of servo-valve. The present solution is to computerize the control of valve through the development of an online fuzzy logic controller for Nitinol valve to maintain the active suspension system control.