In this paper, impedance control for rotatory test beds is presented and discussed. Its goal is highly realistic testing of rotating machinery such as combustion engines through hardware-in-the-loop simulation. As rotatory test beds are typical examples of elastic drive systems, modeling and control of the oscillations arising on the test bed are of great importance. Additionally, a so-called impedance model emulates real-world operating conditions and delivers the load for the unit under test, which is then imposed using an appropriate controller. Specifically, in this paper, model predictive control (MPC) was chosen as it allows for high dynamic control including a priori consideration of constraints. In addition to the MPC, a control Lyapunov function based controller is proposed, resulting in guaranteed closed-loop stability even when active constraints prevent the use of classic MPC stability criteria. Finally, simulations and experimental results achieved on a laboratory setup as well as on an industrial test bed illustrate the efficiency of the proposed control scheme.

In this paper, an approach for high dynamic torque control of an industrial engine test bed is proposed. The main goal is to develop a control concept that is capable of periodic reference tracking at high control bandwidth while at the same time sufficiently rejecting disturbances coming from external excitations. For that reason, model predictive control (MPC) is utilized which offers two major benefits as compared to classical controllers. On the one hand, its capability to explicitly consider constraints can be applied to limitations of the actuating variable on the test bed. On the other hand, it can also be used to increase control bandwidth by anticipating future reference trajectories. For MPC, an accurate test bed model is of vital importance. Therefore, a system model is developed and validated using measurements obtained from the engine test bed. Moreover, a robustifying approach is proposed based on an extended system model to overcome hardly observable, weakly damped engine block suspension dynamics which are difficult to model. The proposed control concept is discussed and validated through simulations as well as through experimental results.