The paper focuses on the development of an innovative methodology for the direct measurement of the main kinematic variables in multibody hydraulic actuation systems.
The analysis investigates how the motion capture technique has been applied to the experimental determination of position, velocity and acceleration of hydraulically controlled actuation systems for off-highway machines.
A number of earth-moving machines has been taken into account, in particular a mini-excavator articulated arm has been equipped with both a standard mechanical system for position and acceleration measurement (including different accelerometers, linear and angular transducers), and a set of IR markers for motion capture application. First, the hydraulically controlled boom-arm-bucket system has been operated using a control routine reproducing a reference operating condition, in order to define the accuracy of the motion capture system in detecting the kinematic quantities’ variations.
At the same time, the hydraulic variables have been also acquired to monitor the behavior during the machine working routine. Thus, the results obtained by the different experimental techniques have been compared, in order to state the reliability of the motion capture technique to predict the fast dynamics of pressure variations through the accurate measurement of mechanical devices’ oscillation.
Finally, the paper reports the main results obtained using the data from the motion capture characterization of the dynamic performance of the mini-excavator, with particular attention devoted to the dynamic analysis through lumped and distributed parameter numerical cosimulation.
