The hydraulic high-speed on/off valve (HSV)—the critical core component of digital hydraulic technology—has a special structural design and manufacture due to its fast opening and closing, which results in high prices and maintenance costs. The solenoid screw-in cartridge valve (SCV) is widely used in the hydraulic industry because of its merits, such as mature technology, reliable quality, and low cost. The contribution of this study is to replace the high-speed on/off valve with the SCV in some areas of application by introducing positive and negative pulse voltage control for the coil of the SCV, which only modifies the control circuit and needs no change in structure. Based on the analysis of the structure of the SCV, the simulation model was developed in AMESim and validated by experiments to investigate the effects of the pulse voltage duration on the open–close dynamic characteristics and find the optimal pulse voltage duration, so that the SCV can open or close in the shortest time to reduce energy loss as far as possible. The simulation results showed that the positive and negative pulse voltage could quicken the rising or declining speed of the coil current and dramatically decrease the opening and closing delay time. By the experimental comparison with the original control method, the opening time of the SCV decreased from 30 ms to 13 ms, and the closing time was reduced from 139 ms to 14 ms.

Digital hydraulic technology as an emergent and important branch of fluid power offers good prospects for intelligence, integration, and energy saving of hydraulic systems. The high-speed on-off valve (HSV) that is a critical component of digital hydraulics has the drawbacks of specific design, narrow scope of application and high price compared to the commercial solenoid screw-in cartridge valve (SCV) widely used in the hydraulic industry at present. In this paper, a hybrid voltage control strategy composed of the preloading voltage, positive pulse voltage, holding voltage and negative pulse voltage is proposed to enhance the dynamic characteristics of the SCV, which makes it meet the demands of the digital hydraulics and achieve the end of replacing the HSV. Based on the structural analysis of the SCV, a mathematical model of the SCV is deduced. Subsequently, the simulation model of the SCV is developed in AMESim and validated by experimental measurements. The effects of the different duty ratios of the preloading voltage and holding voltage on the dynamic characteristics of SCV are studied, and the dynamic responses of the SCV under the normal voltage, positive and negative pulse and hybrid voltage control strategies are compared. The simulation results indicate that the increment of the preload voltage duty ratio and the reduction of the holding voltage duty ratio are conducive for decreasing the total opening and closing time of the SCV, especially the opening delay and closing delay time. The hybrid voltage control proposed has a better effect in dynamic characteristics than the other two strategies, using which the total opening time of the SCV reduces by 74.24% (from 29.5 ms to 7.60 ms), and the total closing time is drastically squeezed by 92.06% (from 136 ms to 10.8 ms). This provides a technical reference for improving the dynamic response speed of SCVs and popularizing digital hydraulic technology.