Theoretical and Experimental Analysis of the Hydraulic Actuator Used in the Active Reflector System

In order to improve the control quality of the active reflector system which is used in the 500 m aperture spherical radio telescope (FAST) project, a study on hydraulic actuator is proposed. The dynamic performance of hydraulic actuator is due to the interaction of several physical phenomena. Modeling of such a system needs a unified approach to represent the nonlinear behavior characteristics. Bond graph model is ideal for this task. In addition, conventional PID control strategy cannot achieve the required accuracy and precision, so we combine grey prediction with PID control. Furthermore, a new adjustment mechanism is presented to change the grey step size, which is simple, automatic, less time-consuming, and efficient. Simulations and experiments on the actuator are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control method. In experiments, the velocity error is less than 0.05mm/s and the position error is less than 0.2mm. It shows the actuator meets the astronomical observation requirement totally.