Innovative Design of Hydraulic Actuation System for Operator Fatigue Reduction and Its Optimization

This paper deals with the proposition of a new design of hydraulic actuation systems (HAS), its modelling and subsequent optimization. The purpose of HAS is to provide the operator, a linkage for actuating large equipment like construction and manufacturing machines, responsible for doing mechanical jobs such as lifting tons of materials and high-force/pressure applications. Owing to the government regulations and economic and reliability constraints, the use of simple hydromechanical interfaces is prevalent in the industry. Furthermore, to ease out the operator’s effort, another interface called as pilot control HAS is dominant among the industrial practices. However, pilot control prevents the operator from controlling the equipment directly, affecting the precision of the operation, which further requires costly electronic interventions. The proposed HAS, which accounts for operators fatigue (by providing hydraulic assistance) and precision (by directly controlling the HAS), provides a cost-effective solution. The proposed HAS, with multiple settings of design parameters, fulfils the varying input effort requirements in a variety of applications. Due to government regulations around safety and operability, it is required to provide a minimum input effort for a particular equipment/application but the effort reduction can be achieved with respect to the user preferences in the proposed HAS. Moreover, it is known that a human mind (operator) could anticipate/calibrate the movements varying only in a linear fashion. The novelty here relates to the modelling of proposed system design and exploration of relationship between operator fatigue and additional cost of manufacturing through single-and/or multi-objective optimization.