Advancing the Capabilities for Miniaturization of Hydraulic and Pneumatic Drives (Part 1)

Introduction

One of the important challenges for market growth of multi-type control systems of industrial manufacturing equipment (machine tools, robots, etc) is the miniaturization of executive power drives. Other areas where miniaturized executive power drives are used include transport vehicles of various types and destinies, energetic objects, medical and public service installations, research laboratory facilities (e.g. fatigue test benches), aerospace vehicles, and military objects and technologies^[1]. The ground for development of miniaturization is necessitated by the challenges of decreasing costs of production of such equipment while increasing the products' efficiency, at least owing to the following:

Maximizing the payload of transport objects and handling machines by minimizing the executive drives in mass-to-dimension rates;

Enhancing manufacturing output as a result of minimizing the operational area, e.g. decreasing the size of stationary robots and manipulators with the aim of increasing density of their arrangement and the number of concurrent process operations respectively;

Improving the probability and veracity (i.e. decreasing the vulnerability) of critical data acquisition by miniaturization of special-purpose vehicles (e.g. reconnaissance rovers, aerospace probes, etc.) and increasing the number of vehicles involved simultaneously.

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