Feasibility Study on the Elimination of Force-Position Coupling in Steering Systems With a Novel Compound Rotary Vane Steering Gear

In this article, a novel compound rotary vane steering gear actuator was designed to solve the problem of strong force-position coupling between the rudder blade and hydrodynamic force during the steering process. The actuator applies active torque to the rudder drive cylinder through a torque decoupling cylinder, so as to eliminate the load torque generated by the hydraulic force on the rudder drive cylinder. The simulation and experiment results show that compared with a single-layer rotary vane steering gear, the compound rotary vane steering gear has faster steering speed, higher position accuracy, and stronger disturbance rejection capability under the influence of hydrodynamic loads. Under disturbances of hydrodynamic load, the average time for the compound rotary vane steering gear to reach steady state is reduced by 37.45%, and the steady-state error is less than 0.1°. When the impact load is encountered, the average stability time is reduced by 41.45%, thus verifying the principle of eliminating load by structure. The compound rotary vane steering gear demonstrated excellent maneuvering performance when applied to steering systems with large inertia and strong nonlinearity.