Performance evaluation of interconnected pneumatic cylinders positioning system

Pneumatic systems are widely used in industries as they possess many advantages such as high speed and better efficiency. The main problem in the pneumatic servo drives is large overshoots due to its high speed. In the design of such pneumatic servo drives, a trade-off between speed and accuracy is common. To overcome this issue, a new design of a positioning system using interconnection of two pneumatic cylinders is presented in this paper. The interconnected system using two pneumatic cylinders for fast and accurate positioning has been design and implemented. A fuzzy based position control system for the interconnected pneumatic cylinders system has been developed and implemented. The disturbance avoidance and trajectory tracking characteristics of the system has been studied. The performance of the positioning ability of the proposed system with interconnected pneumatic cylinders is compared with the conventional servo pneumatic system with single cylinder. The step response characteristics shows that interconnected pneumatic cylinders system exhibits 13.8% more rise time but the overshoot is reduced 28.8% compared to conventional single cylinder servo pneumatic system with supply pressure 0.6 MPa. The sinusoidal responses shows that band width of the interconnected pneumatic cylinder remains almost near the conventional single cylinder servo pneumatic system with supply pressure 0.6 MPa.