Nonlinear Control System Design for Active Lubrication of Hydrostatic Thrust Bearing

The active controlled hydrostatic bearing is becoming more and more popular because of its accuracy, safety, as well as low vibration and noise. In this paper, we present a design approach for a hydrostatic thrust bearing system, where the analytical nonlinear state space equation of the system is established first, and then three kinds of control inputs are investigated and compared to each other. It is found that, by selecting the supply pressure as the control input, we could obtain an affine nonlinear system, which could be linearized by the feedback linearization method, and its robustness could be enhanced by the sliding mode control method. The tracking control law could be easily obtained with the linearized system. The simulation verifies the effectiveness of the nonlinear control law. The proposed nonlinear control model might have a positive effect on the improvement of the machining accuracy, safety, and vibration absorption.