Optimization of hydrostatic-mechanical transmission control strategy by means of torque control

The combination of hydrostatics and mechanical gearboxes cannot only improve system efficiency but also the usability of mobile machines. A possible solution could be a synchronized gearbox with two gears. Compared to the pure hydrostatic drivetrain, mobile machines with such a combination can have a larger drive torque with the first gear and higher efficiency at high speed. However, the calibration effort of this traditional drivetrain system is enormous; moreover, with a flow-based control, the degrees of freedom to achieve optimum shift performance in all conditions are limited. By adopting the primary torque control concept, we propose a novel hydrostatic-mechanical drivetrain control algorithm so that the holistic shift performance is better whilst the calibration effort is dramatically reduced by systematically adjusting only one hyper-parameter. Experienced engineers and machine operators validated the advantages mentioned here by a series of field experiments. Besides synchronized gearboxes, the controller proposed in this paper is also generalized to other kinds of mechanical transmissions.