High-pressure pneumatic control valves have been widely investigated during last decades. The published literature includes experimental and analytical studies on both constant value on-off valve and pressure reducing valve, but rarely on servo valve. In this paper, a novel voice coil motor (VCM) direct drive high-pressure pneumatic servo valve (HPPSV) is proposed. The mathematical model of the HPPSV including electromechanical and fluid subsystem is presented. Furthermore, the hybrid control scheme consisting of a proportional integral differential (PID) controller with velocity/acceleration feed-forward and a disturbance observer is proposed to improve the control performance of the HPPSV, taking into account the factors such as compressibility of high-pressure gas, high nonlinearity of gas flow force and friction force. The experimental results show that the spool position control system based on the proposed control scheme has strong robustness and disturbance rejection capability, and the control accuracy of the valve spool position can be enhanced greatly compared with the conventional PID controller. The study has general implications in the development of high-pressure pneumatic servo valves and high-pressure pneumatic precision control field. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4007702]
