Dynamic behavior of pneumatic systems for lower extremity extenders

This article models a pneumatic system consisting of double-acting or single acting cylinder and a servovalve with the goal of providing an insight into pneumatic design and control requirements for Berkeley Exoskeleton (http://www.me.berkeley.edu/hel/). The modeling approach uses the thermodynamic principles of energy and mass conservation. We demonstrate that pneumatic systems suffer from two effects: unwanted dynamics due to gas compressibility and discontinuous nonlinearities in the servovalves due to choked flow. To obtain a wide control bandwidth, one needs to model these effects thoroughly.