Abstract: To effectively solve the difficulties of conducting experiments in underground coal mines and the problem of irreproducible coal cutting, and to provide a testing platform for the verification of the control strategy of hydraulic supports on the fully-mechanized working face, this article establishes a hardware-in-the-loop simulation system for hydraulic supports. First, based on the hydraulic system schematic diagram of a hydraulic support, a hydraulic system model is built in AMESim. Then, the hydraulic system model is coupled with a mechanical system dynamic model of the hydraulic support in Simulink, to construct a hydraulic support model.Secondly, based on the Simpole real-time simulation platform, a hardware system is built. A method is proposed to use relays as the solenoid valve driver and a port matching device between the relay and the PCIe6323 board to compile the software system model to the Simpole real-time simulation platform to achieve real-time control of the hydraulic support model for extending/retracting the column and the balance jack.The ZY2400/12/20D hydraulic support is used as the experimental object for the unloaded physical experiment. The correctness of the hydraulic support hardware-in-the-loop simulation system is verified by comparing the physical experiment values of the hydraulic support with the hardware-in-the-loop simulation values and analyzing the real-time performance.Finally, the dynamic characteristics of the hydraulic support under load are analyzed by hardware-in-the-loop simulation. By comparing the dynamic characteristics of the hydraulic support under different positions of impact load, it is found that as the position of the impact load moves from the front end of the roof beam towards the tail end, the effect of the impact load on the column gradually decreases, and the balance jack is first compressed and then stretched. There is a critical position between the two hinged points of the top beam and the column and the balance jack. When the impact load is near the critical position, the smaller the compression or tension degree of the balance jack, the more far away from the critical position of the impact load, the greater the compression or tension degree of the balance jack.