A Digital Damping Controller to Increases the Safety in Hydraulic Pumping Systems

Abstract

Hydraulic pumping systems are ubiquitous in a wide range of industrial processes. However, such systems may exhibit dangerous pressure oscillations, which may lead to serious equipment damage and no programmed plant outage. In order to prevent equipment damage, this paper proposed a damping controller to mitigate dangerous pressure oscillations in hydraulic pumping systems. The controller design is based on frequency domain techniques. For implementation objectives, the resulting damping control law is then converted to discrete time domain by using Tustins methodology and, subsequently, embedded in a hardware built around a 32-bits ARM microcontroller. To assess the controller performance, experimental tests were developed on a laboratory scale pumping system comprised of a centrifugal pump driven by an induction motor-inverter set. The experimental results showed that the proposed controller provides an improve performance by mitigating the pressure oscillations in the tubes. Furthermore, the approach is of low-cost implementation in existing pumping systems.