New solutions for electrohydraulic control systems with separate metering edges for mobile machinery

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Jürgen Weber
• Subject Area: Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 198148399

The objective of the project is the systematical exploration of structural implementations of load-compensated, electro-hydraulic control systems with separate metering edges for mobile machinery. A comparison between known control concepts with separate metering edges and the newly developed solutions shows many advantages especially in terms of energy consumption, design, comissioning expenses as well as costs. In addition to these general criteria, certain sub-goals can be to be pursued:- Lowering the energy consumption by reducing the losses at the tank edges- Simplifying the design of control edges in comparison to conventional systems- Simple control strategies for operating the individual metering elements and thus achieving at least as good dynamic performance as existing control systems- Reduction of components expense (solenoids, valves, sensors) compared to previously known system solutions with separate control edges - Control on the basis of electro-hydraulic control systems- Load-compensated operation of consumers - Simple implementation of circuits to exploit recuperation and regeneration potentials.The main objective of the work during the second phase is the implementation of the preferred variants at the excavator test rig in the labroratry of the Institute of Fluid Power. In addition to a component related expansion of the excavator test rig the development, implementation, commissioning and analysis of the operating strategy including control concept will be work packages. Because of the industries interest in the basic research orientation of the project, the needed valve technology for the planned experiments will be provided by industry partners. Another research aspect, which has been obtained in the context of the preceded work, is the analysis and representation of energy distribution within drive systems with parallel operated consumers. The commonly used representations in the literature, such as Sankey diagrams or power distribution diagrams in bar graphs have reached there limits. Here, the frequencies of occurrence of operating points have proved to be an illustrative tool.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants