Simulation-Aided Testing of Electro-Hydraulic Pump for Excavator

This paper presents a concept of pump HIL (Hardware-In the Loop) Simulation system for testing an electro-hydraulic pump of mid-class excavator. The pump HIL Simulation system integrates both the system analysis and the pump bench evaluation technique in order to enable the evaluation of the control performance of the pump during various operating condition with the entire excavator system. Hence, the analytical system model of the excavator is developed for calculating hydraulic load variation which applied to the pump during working cycle. To reflect the real dynamic characteristics of the pump, the pump in the system model is replaced with the real pump of the HIL test-bed. Moreover, linear controller is designed to test the discharge flow tracking performance of the pump and to validate the function of the HIL Simulation system. As a result, the proposed pump HIL Simulation system is verified and more effective for the advanced pump test-bed in the viewpoint of the performance evaluation.