Design and Verification of MIL for Linear Actuator

Sammanfattning: In a world where development of new technology moves rapidly towards renewable energy resources, it is important to implement new technology for efficiency improvement on existing products. This is Cascade Drives ambition, to enable a shift from hydraulic usage in heavy vehicles to a solution that is completely electromechanical driven, to improve energy efficiency.  Currently, Cascade Drives are developing electromechanical linear actuators to replace hydraulic driven actuators in heavy vehicles such as forklifts, both for lifting and steering applications.  These actuators are designed with a rack and pinion setup where multiple pinions are placed on a single rack and by using a patented flexible solution, an otherwise overdetermined system can share the load evenly over the pinions. This significantly reduce the size of each pinion and the overall package.  This master thesis aims at investigating the power losses in this electromechanical actuator and implement a model in the loop (MIL) to predict the efficiency and how this alters for different speeds and loads applied on the actuator.  A model to predict the efficiency was implemented in Simulink software and two different verification tests on physical prototypes were conducted. The results showed that the predicted load dependent losses corresponded well to the measured values. The speed dependent losses proved harder to predict.