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 2N 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

This article presents digital fluid power as a new branch of fluid power which offers high potential for innovative solutions. The variety of digital concepts is quite large and digital concepts have long been successfully applied in low-power applications. Research and development is now becoming more intensive, being undertaken by several research groups and also more and more in industry. First applications will be brought to industry soon. A successful application requires new components, a sound understanding of system and new control principles.

In this paper, cavitation in water hydraulic poppet valves is investigated by an experimental method with a half cut test model. The situation of cavitation appearance, the effects of cavitation on the characteristics of flow rate, noise level, pressure distributions and the boundary of inception of the cavitation are investigated. Comparison between a poppet valve with sharp edged seat and another, which has a length on the seat, is made. The effects of change in the shape of the seat are discussed as well as the effect of cavitation appearance. As a result, it is revealed that the sharp edged seat valve is less influenced by the cavitation on its characteristics.

This study proposes a novel digital hydraulic valve system using multiple equal size on/off valves and a circulating switching control, with an aim to increase the resolution and the linearity of the digital hydraulic valve systems. The solution is founded on the equal coded valve system concept which represents a recent development in the digital hydraulic valve technology. The circulating switching control algorithm is used to overcome nonlinearities occurring in the typical non-circulating switching control and to decrease the operating frequency of single on/off valves. As a result, a substantial improvement in tracking control performance is demonstrated with 8 + 8 parallel connected valves. The results verify that compact, robust, and high-performance valve control can be realized.