This presentation was made at the 2019 NAFEMS World Congress in Quebec Canada

Resource Abstract

HIL is an increasingly used technique in the development of high performance devices. By means of this method it is possible to simulate sensors, actuators and mechanical components of a system before they are integrated. The fields in which it is most diffused are automotive systems, aerospace, robotics, power system generators and offshore and marine engineering. The high performance required by the HIL simulator in order to perform the simulation tasks necessitates an accurate mechanical electronics and informatics design. A fundamental tool in the support of a design system of this type is Co-Simulation.



This paper presents the design, development and results of a Co-Simulation system of an HIL device based on a 6DOF parallel kinematic manipulator. This device was designed to perform the simulation of the effects of the sea on a physical scaled model placed and operative in a wind tunnel. The purpose of this is to characterize a model subject, and at the same time to assess the effects of the interaction between wind, generated by the wind tunnel and sea waves, simulated by the HIL system.



The Co-Simulation system presented in this paper, was developed by coupling the MSC ADAMS multibody model with Matlab SIMULINK: in particular the control structure, the actuation system, and the friction behaviour were described through the use of Matlab SIMULINK whilst the mechanical behaviour of the system via a multibody approach. Such co-simulation, these interact thus allowing one to test the HIL simulation to analyse the feasibility, check the control algorithm, verify the performance attainable and asses the safety features.



This work also shows the results obtained by the numerical simulation and the comparison with the actual physical system. The quality of the simulation results was good enough to be used in the tuning of the control algorithm and in the testing of several experimental setups.