Shearer Height Adjustment Based on Mechanical-Electrical-Hydraulic Cosimulation

The automatic height adjustment of a shearer cutting drum is a key technology for shearer automation. However, a fundamental and important requirement for underground electronic products is explosion-proof rating, which creates great challenges to the research on the control method of the shearer height adjustment system. To address this problem, a novel shearer height adjustment control method was proposed based on basic fuzzy control, and the feasibility of the height adjustment method was studied with the help of multisoftware cosimulation technology. First, the drum cutting coal model was established using Finite Element Method (FEM) software LS-DYNA, the mechanical model of the gear transmission system model and the height adjustment system were constructed with the multibody dynamics software ADAMS, the hydraulic height adjusting system model was constructed with AMESim, and a fuzzy controller for shearer height adjustment was developed in Simulink. Then, the data conversion interface between the mentioned models was constructed using MATLAB, to obtain the cosimulation model for the shearer automatic height adjustment. Finally, with the help of fuzzy control method, the feasibility of the cosimulation model used in the adaptive control method of the shearer drum height adjustment was verified. The results show that the cosimulation model can adequately describe the height adjustment process of a shearer, which lays a foundation for the optimization of adaptive height adjustment method. At the same time, the proposed model is also applicable for studying the dynamic characteristics of the mechanical-electrical-hydraulic coordination in the process of shearer adaptive height adjustment.