Two Stage Flow Regulation Valve Control Optimization by Software Techniques and Mathematics of Digital Systems Approach

The increased systems complexity and performance request for electro-hydraulic applications, ask for more performing electronic systems and control functions. The new more performing microcontrollers and efficient cross compilers, encourage the floating point mathematics usage in the software control routines, useful to directly reuse the routines generated by the simulation tools, despite the lack of control for precise resulting routine execution time. The paper describes the improvements in performance of a practical experience carried out on an electronic system optimization managing an electro-hydraulic two stage directional valve for vehicular applications. A deeper analysis done on the software side of the application, revealed that a custom firmware setup and local mathematical software implementation optimizations, led to an optimal system configuration for performance. Here it is shown that, without lack of precision, fixed point mathematics, locally optimized, and a higher attention paid to tasks timing, results in a more performing software schedule executed by the embedded hardware, even if more instructions are executed due to the necessary rescaling of factors needed by the requested precision and if and more control tasks are activated.