Research articleAcceleration tracking control combining adaptive control and off-line compensators for six-degree-of-freedom electro-hydraulic shaking tables

- Acceleration closed-loop transfer functions are identified and their inverse models are designed.
- A three-variable controller, an inverse model controller, and a delay compensator are designed.
- A novel controller combining off-line compensators with an adaptive controller is proposed.
- Experimental results improve acceleration tracking accuracy on a 6-DOF electro-hydraulic shaking table.

An electro-hydraulic shaking table (EHST) is an essential experimental facility to simulate in real-time actual vibration situations. An adaptive controller combined with off-line compensators is proposed to improve the acceleration frequency bandwidth and tracking accuracy of a six-degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) EHST. A servo controller has been employed to implement acceleration closed-loop and coordinate control of the 6-DOF EHST. A recursive extended least-squares algorithm is employed to identify acceleration closed-loop transfer functions and a zero-phase-error tracking controller is used to design off-line inverse model compensators using the identified transfer functions. However, the off-line compensators cannot compensate in real-time varying dynamics of the 6-DOF EHST; so an online adaptive controller with a least-mean-squares (LMS) algorithm based on a delay compensator is employed. The proposed controller combines advantages of the off-line compensators and the online adaptive controller, which guarantees both a fast rate of convergence of the LMS algorithm and high-fidelity acceleration tracking accuracy of the 6-DOF EHST. Some experimental studies have been conducted on a 6-DOF EHST and experimental results show that acceleration tracking control performances, including the rate of convergence of the LMS algorithm and acceleration tracking accuracy, have been improved compared to a conventional three-variable controller and adaptive controllers.