Mechatronic Design of Digital Hydraulic Micro Valve Package

Abstract

Digital hydraulic valve system is a new kind of hydraulic control valve assembly, which has potential to save energy and improve performance of valve controlled actuators. The typical digital valve system has 4-6 parallel connected on/off valves per control edge totaling 16-24 valves in the four-way valve configuration. The flow capacities of the parallel connected valves are set according to the powers of two such that it is possible to achieve 2 N different flow rates with N valves. An alternative approach is to use equally sized valves, which means that N parallel connected valves give only N+1 different flow rates. This approach has several benefits, but the number of valves becomes very large. This paper shows that it is possible to implement valve assembly having 128 miniaturized valves, such that it can be installed instead of traditional CETOP3 servo or proportional valve. Careful electromagnetic optimization and mechatronic design are used together with novel manufacturing methods and new type of power electronics. The prototype is build and experimentally studied and results show that the performance of this kind of digital valve system is superior to traditional four-way control valves in terms of response time and fault tolerance.

Selective Laser Melted Digital Hydraulic Valve System

“…In order to make digital valve systems a feasible alternative for proportional valves in a wider area of applications, their size must be reduced. Research into miniaturizing digital valve systems has been conducted for close to ten years now and it is ongoing [4][5][6] . Miniaturizing the individual on/off valves reduces the dimensions of the valve systems or enables including a larger number of valves in a certain sized valve system, thus improving the control resolution of flow rate and the motion of hydraulic actuators.…”

Investigation on positioning control strategy and switching optimization of an equal coded digital valve system

“…Each DFCU prototype consists of eight on/off valves which are driven by an AC booster power electronic circuit presented in Linjama et al 24 The circuit provides high current peak to open a valve by using 220 uF boost capacitor and low holding voltage to maintain the valve open. The average flow coefficients of the two DFCUs are 10.2 × 10 −9 and 11 . 9 × 1 0 − 9 m 3 / s Pa , respectively.…”

Design and Experimental Research of a Miniature Digital Hydraulic Valve

“…Under 21 MPa test pressure, the opening response time is 2 ms, and the closing time response is 2.8 ms. The fourth generation of solenoid valve with outer diameter of 10 mm has been developed in 2014 [ 15 ]. The fourth generation of micro solenoid valves can be seen in Ref.…”

“…The fourth generation of micro solenoid valves can be seen in Ref. [ 15 ] (Figure 3). Compared with the stainless steel coil skeleton used in the third generation of micro valve, the fourth generation of a valve coil uses polyacetal resin material to prevent the magnetic circuit from breaking.…”