IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 63, NO.

9, SEPTEMBER 2016 853

Real-Time Digital Hardware Simulation

of the Rodless Pneumatic System
Chun-Hsien Yeh, Pei-Yin Chen, Member, IEEE, Yen-Chen Lai, Hao-Ting Lin, Chia-Hao Li, and Pei-Hua Chang

AbstractThis brief presents an area-efficient hardware imple-

mentation for simulating a rodless pneumatic system (RPS) in real
time. The proposed implementation involves a very-large-scale-
integration architecture. A hardware-sharing technique, which
can be used to efficiently reduce the computational resources
required, is incorporated into the architecture. Furthermore, the
parameters and input/output bit widths are flexible and can be
modified for specific applications. To the best of our knowledge,
the proposed RPS circuit is the first application-specific integrated
circuit (ASIC) implementation, and no related state-of-the-art
ASIC design exists in the literature. The simulation indicates that
the proposed circuit designed using the Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Company 90-nm technology contains 767-k gate
counts and a Q30.24 bit width. The experimental results show that
the proposed architecture satisfies precision requirements with low
hardware complexity.
Index TermsLow cost, real time, rodless pneumatic system
(RPS), very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture.
I. I NTRODUCTION
R ODLESS pneumatic systems (RPSs) have been widely
used in the industrial automation due to their relatively
low cost, ease of maintenance, safety, and high reliability
[1][3]. However, the RPS is a highly nonlinear dynamical
system due to the compressibility of air, friction forces, and
asymmetry of the air pressure forces in the cylinder compart-
ments. Their dynamic behavior can be described using a set of
differential equations (in continuous time) or difference equa-
tions (in discrete time) [4], [5]. Moreover, these equations can
be used to conduct simulations, for which the industry standard
mathematical modeling software MATLAB, AUTOMSIM, or
PSIM is used. Simulations are conducted before experimental
validation. One of the main drawbacks of simulations is that
they cannot be used to verify a developed controller in real time,
and they consume a considerable amount of time. Thus, the
real-time digital rodless pneumatic simulator can play an im-
portant role in the power system [6][10]. We only focus on the
very large scale integration (VLSI) architecture implementation
Manuscript received April 1, 2015; revised August 17, 2015 and
November 4, 2015; accepted February 19, 2016. Date of publication
February 25, 2016; date of current version August 25, 2016. This brief was
recommended by Associate Editor S. Hu.
C.-H. Yeh, P.-Y. Chen, Y.-C. Lai, and C.-H. Li are with the Depart-
ment of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng
Kung University, Tainan 701, Taiwan (e-mail: p78981176@mail.ncku.edu.tw;
pychen@mail.ncku.edu.tw; p78001324@mail.ncku.edu.tw; p76014119@mail.
ncku.edu.tw).
H.-T. Lin is with the Department of Mechanical and Computer-Aided
Engineering, Feng Chia University, Taichung 407, Taiwan (e-mail: haotlin@
fcu.edu.tw).
P.-H. Chang is with the Department of Electronic Engineering, Kun Shan
University, Tainan 710, Taiwan (e-mail: paulchan@mail.ksu.edu.tw).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this brief are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSII.2016.2535043
1549-7747 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Fig. 1. RPS schema.
of the rodless pneumatic simulator in this brief. To our knowl-
edge, the proposed RPS circuit is the first application-specific
integrated circuit (ASIC) implementation, and no related state-
of-the-art ASIC design exists in the literature.
By using the hardware-sharing technique, we propose an
area-efficient VLSI architecture for the RPS simulator. The
proposed VLSI architecture was implemented and synthesized
using Verilog HDL and Synopsys Design Vision. In our design,
the parameters and input/output bit widths can be modified
easily for specific applications. Thus, the proposed VLSI ar-
chitecture is highly flexible and capable of simulating a wide
variety of pneumatic systems using the same hardware. To
validate the accuracy and demonstrate the performance of the
proposed VLSI architecture, the IEEE 754 double precision
was used as the benchmark to compare the simulation results.
Finally, experimental results demonstrated the improved speed
efficiency of the proposed architecture. Moreover, details of the
percentage error calculation are presented in this brief.
The rest of this brief is organized as follows. Section II
describes a mathematical model of the RPS and the adopted
discretization models and Section III explains the VLSI archi-
tecture and the hardware implementation in detail. Section IV
presents the experimental results and discussions, and finally,
Section V concludes this brief.
II. OVERVIEW OF RODLESS P NEUMATIC M ODEL
This section presents an overview of the rodless pneumatic
model and discretization models adopted in the proposed de-
sign. Fig. 1 shows the schema of the RPS. The dynamic models
of the RPS primarily comprise the dynamics of the pneumatic
servo valve, mass flow rate equation of the pneumatic cylinder,
continuity equation, and motion equation [1], [11]. Each of
these elements is described briefly in the following sections.
A. Dynamics of the Pneumatic Servo Valve
The dynamic behavior of the valve can be expressed using a
first-order model as follows:
X(t) Kv
X(t) = + u(t) (1)
Tt Tt
854 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 63, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2016

where X(t) is the spool displacement of the pneumatic servo where Cv is the specific heat of air at constant volume, c is
valve, Kv is the displacement-voltage gain, Tt is the time the cylinder air density, V (t) is the cylinder volume, Cp is the
coefficient, and u(t) is the control input. specific heat of air at constant pressure, P (t) is the cylinder
chamber pressure, m(t)C
p Ts is the change in the internal gas
B. Mass Flow Rate Equation of the Pneumatic Cylinder energy, and P (t)V (t) is the work done by the cylinder.
The mass flow rate of Chambers A and B of the pneumatic The chamber volumes are defined as follows:
cylinder can be expressed as follows:
Va (t) = A (y(t) + ) (9)
Cd C0 wX(t)Pu (t)f(Pr (t)) Vb (t) = A (l y(t) + ) (10)
m(t)
= (2)
Tu
where l is the stroke length and is an equivalent extra length
where Cd is the discharge coefficient (Cd = 0.8), C0 is the of the cylinder.
mass flow parameter, w is the port width, Pu (t) is the up- The cylinder continuity equations are approximated as shown
stream pressure, Tu is the upstream temperature, Pr (t) =
(Pd (t)/Pu (t)) is the ratio between the downstream and up- kRTs Cd C0 wX(t)f (Pa (t), Ps, Pe)kPa (t)V a (t)
stream pressure, and Pa (t) = (11)
Va (t)

1, Patm
Pu (t) < Pr (t) < Cr
kRT s Cd C0 wX(t)f (Pb (t), Ps, Pe)kPb (t)Vb (t)
 P b (t) = (12)
f (Pr (t)) =  2  1
(3) Vb (t)
Ck Prk (t)Pr k (t) 2 , Cr < Pr (t) < 1
k+1

where k (which is equal to 1.4) is the specific heat constant and

where Patm is the atmospheric pressure. For air, k = 1.4, Cr = R [which is equal to 287 J/(kgK)] is the universal gas constant.
0.528, and Ck = 3.864 are derived. As a result, m a (t) and
m b (t) can be introduced as follows:
D. Motion Equation
a (t) = Cd C0 wX(t)f (Pa (t), Ps , Pe )
m (4)
b (t) = Cd C0 wX(t)f (Pb (t), Ps , Pe )
m (5) According to Newtons second law of motion, the motion of
the pneumatic cylinder can be expressed as follows:
where Ps is the supply pressure (which is equal to 5
105 N/m2 ), Pe is the exhaust pressure (which is equal to A (Pa (t) Pb (t)) Fr (y(t),
Pa (t), Pb (t)) = M y(t) (13)
1 105 N/m2 ), and Pa (t) and Pb (t) are the pressure of
Chambers A and B, respectively. In addition, f (Pa (t), Ps , Pe ) y(t) = A (Pa (t) Pb (t)) Fr (y(t),
Pa (t), Pb (t)) (14)
and f (Pb (t), Ps , Pe ) can be expressed as
where A is the piston area, M is the blocks mass of the
f (Pa (t), Ps , Pe ) pneumatic cylinder, y(t) is the block position of the rodless
 Pa (t)
Ps f ( Ps )
pneumatic cylinder, and Fr (y(t),
Pa (t), Pb (t)) is a function of
Ts , as chamber A is a driving chamber, Ps Pa (t)



the friction force; this function is described as follows:
Pa (t)f(PaP(t)

s
) 
Ts
, as chamber A is a driving chamber, Ps < Pa (t)
= (0 +1 )sgn(y(t))
, if y(t)
=0


 Pa (t)
Pa (t)f ( Pe ) Fr (y(t),
Pa (t), Pb (t)) =

, as chamber B is a driving chamber, Pe < Pa (t) (0 +2 |y(t)|)
sgn(y(t))
, otherwise


Ts

Pe f( Pe )
 Pa (t)
(15)
Ts
, as chamber B is a driving chamber, Pe Pa (t)
where 0 is the maximum static friction and 1 , 2 , and are
(6) the velocity coefficients of the kinetic friction.
f (P
b (t), P ,
s
e
P ) For the digital time-domain simulation, we need to transform
Ps f P
Pb (t)
the continuous system differential equations into discrete dif-

s , as chamber B is a driving chamber, Ps Pb (t)

Ts

ference equations. This transformation can be effected using

Pb (t)f PP(t) various numerical integration methods. Among them, the Euler


s

Ts
b
, as chamber B is a driving chamber, Ps < Pb (t) and fourth-order RungKutta (RK4) discretization methods are
=

P (t)f b
P (t) the most common in power system applications [12]. These
b Pe , as chamber A is a driving chamber, Pe < Pb (t)
numerical methods solve ordinary differential equations and ap-

T


s

proximate the solution of an initial problem based on numerical

Pe f P
Pb (t)
e , as chamber A is a driving chamber, P P (t)
Ts e b calculations, which mainly involve addition and multiplication.
(7) Compared with the Euler method, the RK4 method had high
simulation accuracy [12]. In this brief, we adopted the RK4
where Ts (which is equal to 293 K) is the cylinder air temperature. method.
Even though the accuracy increases with increasing order, the
C. Continuity Equation larger amount of computations involved at higher orders results
Assuming that the airflow into the pneumatic cylinder is an in a greater degree of hardware resource usage for hardware
adiabatic process of an ideal gas, the change in energy can be implementation. To ensure that the proposed architecture is low
expressed as follows: cost, the proposed VLSI architecture adopts a hardware-sharing
technique, which efficiently reduces the computing resources.
d The equations of the adopted discretization model and the VLSI
p Ts P (t)V (t)
(Cv c V (t)Ts ) = m(t)C
(8)
dt architecture are detailed in the following sections.
YEH et al.: REAL-TIME DIGITAL HARDWARE SIMULATION OF RPS 855

Fig. 2. Block diagram of our VLSI architecture.

TABLE I Fig. 3. Architecture of VSDG.

R ELATION B ETWEEN L UMPED PARAMETERS AND C OEFFICIENT

Fig. 4. Architecture of CAMFC.

III. H ARDWARE I MPLEMENTATION ity, the computation result for (kv u[n] X[n]) can be reused.
Thus, k1_x , k2_x , k3_x , and k4_x can be calculated as follows:
Fig. 2 shows a block diagram of the proposed VLSI architec-
ture, which consists of four main blocks: the parameter module X[n] Kv
(PM), pneumatic model solver (PMS), register file (RF), and k1_x = + u[n] = C1 (Kv u[n]X[n]) (17)
Tt Tt
control unit. All variables and parameters are represented in X[n]+ h2 k1_x Kv
a signed fixed-point format. In the architecture, the parame- k2_x = + u[n] = C2 (Kv u[n]X[n]) (18)
ters and input/output bit widths can be modified for specific Tt Tt
applications. Thus, the proposed VLSI architecture is highly X[n]+ h2 k2_x Kv
k3_x = + u[n] = C3 (Kv u[n]X[n]) (19)
flexible and capable of simulating a wide variety of systems Tt Tt
using the same hardware. Moreover, the computation units X[n]+hk3_x Kv
k4_x = + u[n] = C4 (Kv u[n]X[n]) (20)
which do not affect the working speed are reused to achieve an Tt Tt
area-efficient VLSI architecture. An example of the hardware-
sharing technique will be illustrated in Section III-B. where C1 , C2 , C3 , and C4 are the input from the PM. Fig. 3 de-
The four main blocks are described briefly in the following picts the architecture of the VSDG. The servo valve is calculated
sections. with five multipliers (denoted as MULT), a subtractor (denoted
as SUB), and four bit length normalization (BLN) units. The nor-
malization is performed using the arithmetic right shift operation.
A. PM
The CAMFC and CBMFC calculate the mass flow of
The PM stores the values of the coefficients (shown in Chambers A and B of the pneumatic cylinder. Fig. 4 shows
Table I) in addition to the simulation time-step size. It transfers the architecture of the CAMFC. All the possible values of
the values of Ci and h to the PMS. f (Pa (t), Ps , Pe ) and f (Pb (t), Ps , Pe ) are used to establish a
lookup table (denoted as LUT unit).
B. PMS The CAPC and CBPC calculate the pressure of the cylinder
Chambers A and B. The RK4 discretization method can be
The PMS comprises a valve spool displacement genera-
used to determine the pressure of Chamber A according to the
tor (VSDG), Chamber A mass flow calculator (CAMFC),
following expression:
Chamber B mass flow calculator (CBMFC), Chamber A
pressure calculator (CAPC), Chamber B pressure calculator h
Pa [n + 1] = Pa [n]+ (k1_pa+2k2_pa+2k3_pa+k4_pa ) (21)
(CBPC), and cylinder block position generator (CBPG). 6
The VSDG calculates the spool displacement of the pneumatic C6 m a [n] C7 Pa [n]V a0
servo valve. The VSDG behavior model is described in the pre- k1_pa = (22)
Va0 
ceding section. The RK4 discretization method can be used to C6 m a [n] C7 Pa [n] + 2 k1_pa V a1
h
determine the servo valve according to the following expression: k2_pa = (23)
 Va1
h C6 m a [n] C7 Pa [n] + h2 k2_pa V a2
X[n + 1] = X[n] + (k1_x + 2k2_x + 2k3_x + k4_x ) (16) k3_pa = (24)
6 Va2
where X[n + 1] is the previously calculated value and h is the C6 m a [n] C7 (Pa [n] + h k3_pa ) V a3
k4_pa = . (25)
simulation time-step size. To reduce the computational complex- Va3
856 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMSII: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 63, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2016

Fig. 5. Architecture of CAPC. Fig. 7. Pseudocode of control unit.

IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS

We applied the RK4 discretization method with the IEEE754
double precision format to the RPS dynamic model presented in
[1] and [11] and constructed a software RPS simulator written
with C programming language running on an Intel Core i5-2500T
CPU at 2.3 GHz. According to our experiments, we found that
the RPS software simulator can generate about ten output results
per second. Because the RPS is typically used in complex
industrial control applications and requires high trajectory po-
Fig. 6. Architecture of CBPG. sition accuracy, obviously, the simulation speed of the software
simulator is not fast enough for real-time control simulation.
Fig. 5 illustrates the architecture of the CAPC. BLN is The proposed RPS circuit was implemented by using
performed using the arithmetic right shift operation. Verilog HDL and synthesized by SYNOPSYS Design Vi-
The CBPG calculates the block position of the pneumatic sion with a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
cylinder. Fig. 6 depicts the architecture of the CBPG. Assume (TSMC) 90-nm cell library. In the simulation, we realized
that M = 1. The RK4 discretization method can be used to de- the proposed VLSI architecture with three different bit widths
termine the block position of the pneumatic cylinder according (Q30.24/Q30.32/Q30.40), where Q30.24 is a signed fixed-point
to the following expression: bit width representing 1 b for the sign, 29 b for an integer value,
A (Pa (t)Pb (t))Fr (y(t),
Pa (t), Pb (t)) = y(t) (26) and 24 b for a fractional value. The synthesis results show
that our circuit contains 767k gate counts and could operate
= y(t) = C8 (Pa (t)Pb (t))Fr (y(t),P
u(t) a (t),Pb (t)) (27)
at a clock period of 50 ns with the Q30.24 bit width. Thus,
h the proposed RPS hardware simulator can generate up to 1000
u[n + 1] = u[n] + (k1_u + 2k2_u + 2k3_u + k4_u ) (28)
6 output results per second, which should be fast enough for most
k1_u = C8 (Pa [n] Pb [n]) Fr (u[n], Pa [n], Pb [n]) (29)
    industrial control applications.
h h To verify the proposed RPS circuit, the simulation patterns
k2_u = C8 Pa [n] + k1_pa Pb [n] + k1_pb
2 2 generated by the software RPS simulator are treated as golden

Fr (u[n], Pa [n], Pb [n])
   (30)
patterns and used to automatically compare with the output data
h h generated by our circuit after gate-level simulation. Because the
k3_u = C8 Pa [n] + k2_pa Pb [n] + k2_pb input voltages of the pneumatic servo valve range from 0 to
2 2
10 V and the rodless pneumatic cylinder can be driven by the
Fr (u[n], Pa [n], Pb [n]) (31) valve, the input signals for the simulation are given with the
k4_u = C8 ((Pa [n] + hk3_pa ) (Pb [n] + hk3_pb )) fixed values (1, 3, or 9 V) and the sine wave function that in-
Fr (u[n], Pa [n], Pb [n]) . (32) volves system trajectory position performances. The sine wave
function can be expressed as
C. RF u(t) = a sin(wt) + b (33)
The RF first stores each computation result when the con- where a is the amplitude of the voltage, w is the angular
troller enables the registers, and it then transfers all the values frequency, and b is the shift of the voltage. Fig. 8 shows the
to other components in the PMS in the next cycle. All the comparison results of u(t) = 5 sin(10t) + 5. Obviously, the
dedicated registers in the architecture are synchronized by the output results of the proposed circuit are close to that of the soft-
rising edge of a global clock. ware RPS simulator.
Assume that the error between the results obtained from
D. Control Unit the software simulator and hardware implementation can be
The control unit, which is realized with a finite-state machine, calculated by using the expression
monitors the data flow and sends proper control signals to |golden result|
all other components. It also sends a signal to control timing sta- Error% = 100 (34)
|golden|
tuses, and it schedules the reading and writing statuses of the data.
The controller is designed such that the proposed circuit can au- where golden and result represent the simulated results of the
tomatically receive input data and produce results when the start software RPS simulator and the proposed circuit. Table II lists
signal is enabled. Fig. 7 shows the pseudocode of the control unit. the percentage error results of the proposed RPS circuit with
YEH et al.: REAL-TIME DIGITAL HARDWARE SIMULATION OF RPS
Fig. 8. Performance comparison of software and hardware with Q30.24. (a) Mass flow A. (b) Mass flow B. (c) Pressure A. (d) Pressure B. (e) Valve spool
displacement. (f) Block position.
TABLE II
C OMPARISON OF E RROR FOR RK4 M ETHODS
TABLE III
R EDUCTION IN VSDG, CAMFC, CBMFC, CAPC, CBPC, AND CBPG
three different bit widths. The circuit with higher bit width
achieves higher simulation accuracy at the cost of more area
cost and slow throughput.
Given the target throughput which is 1000 output results per
second, in the proposed circuit, we consider hardware sharing
and reuse cautiously only those computation units which do not
affect the target throughput. Table III shows the cost reduction in
the proposed circuits by using the hardware-sharing technique.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this brief, an area-efficient hardware implementation for a
real-time rodless pneumatic simulator was proposed. The pro-
857
posed architecture adopts a hardware-sharing technique, which
greatly reduces hardware cost requirements. The performance
evaluation indicates that the proposed design achieves a higher
working speed compared with software implementations of the
simulator and its accuracy is close to that of the software im-
plementation of the RK4 method. The architecture is proven to
be a favorable candidate for high-performance high-flexibility
circuit in power system applications.
R EFERENCES
[1] M. H. Chiang, L. W. Lee, C. F. Kuo, and Y. N. Chen, A H tracking-
based adaptive sliding-mode controller for nonlinear pneumatic path
tracking systems via a functional approximation approach, J. Chin. Soc.
Mech. Eng., vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 507515, 2009.
[2] Y. C. Tsai and A. C. Huang, Multiple-surface sliding controller design
for pneumatic servo systems, Mechatronics, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 506512,
Nov. 2008.
[3] Z. Rao and G. M. Bone, Nonlinear modeling and control of servo
pneumatic actuators, IEEE Trans. Control Syst. Technol., vol. 16, no. 3,
pp. 11441151, May 2008.
[4] P. C. Krause, O. Wasynczuk, and S. D. Sudhoff, Analysis of Electric
Machinery. New York, NY, USA: IEEE Press, Jan. 1995.
[5] P. C. Krause, O. Wasynczuk, and S. D. Sudhoff, Analysis of Electric
Machinery and Drive System, 2nd ed. New York, NY, USA: IEEE Press,
Mar. 2002.
[6] S. Lentijo, A. Monti, E. Santi, C. Welch, and R. Dougal, A new testing
tool for power electronic digital control, in Proc. IEEE Conf. Power
Electron. Spec., 2003, pp. 8187.
[7] V. Dinavahi, R. Iravani, and R. Bonert, Design of a real-time digital
simulator for a D-STATCOM system, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 51,
no. 5, pp. 10011008, Jun. 2004.
[8] H. Li, M. Steurer, K. Shi, S. Woodruff, and D. Zhang, Development
of a unified design, test, and research platform for wind energy systems
based on hardware-in-the-loop real-time simulation, IEEE Trans. Ind.
Electron., vol. 53, no. 4, pp. 11441151, Jun. 2006.
[9] B. Lu, X. Wu, H. Figueroa, and A. Monti A low-cost real-time hardware-
in-the-loop testing approach of power electronics control, IEEE Trans.
Power Del., vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 919931, Apr. 2007.
[10] G. G. Parma and V. Dinavahi, Real-time digital hardware simulation of
power electronics and drives, IEEE Trans. Power Del., vol. 22, no. 2,
pp. 12351246, Apr. 2007.
[11] M. H. Chiang and H. T. Lin, Development of a 3D parallel mechanism
robot arm with three vertical- axial pneumatic actuators combined with a
stereo vision system, Sensors, vol. 11, no. 12, pp. 11 47611 494, 2011.
[12] R. B. Bhat and S. Chakraverty, Numerical Analysis in Engineering.
New Delhi, India: Narosa, 2011.