Design of Electric Linear Load Simulator based on LabVIEW+PXI

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China
² Shanghai Aerospace Control Technology Institute, Shanghai 201109, China

Abstract

In order to realize the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments of a certain type of electric linear actuator in the laboratory, an electric linear load simulator (ELLS) based on LabVIEW+PXI platform was developed to simulate the external force of the actuator under actual working conditions. In structural design, the ball screw is used to convert the PMSM torque into linear force. In hardware design, the system is built using the upper-lower computer system architecture based on PXI bus. In software design, the program is written in LabVIEW, which mainly includes the data processing and display program in the upper computer and the data acquisition program, the loading motor control program and the actuator control program in the lower computer (PXI), in order to ensure the loading accuracy of ELLS, control methods such as force closed-loop PID controller, position feedforward compensation and input feedforward compensation are also introduced in the loading motor program. Finally, the ELLS was built and the signal tracking tests were carried out. The experimental results shows that the loading accuracy can reach 93.5% and 90.3% when ELLS tracks 1000N-2 Hz and 1000N-5 Hz respectively, which proved that the accuracy of ELLS satisfies the “Double Ten Index”.