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

Innovative approaches

The miniaturization of all the components of executive drives (valves, pumps, leverage, gear pairs, motors, etc.) is an imperative of the industrial development from at least cost-benefit, security and military points of view. Therefore, techniques and designs for miniaturization will be in progressive development under growing requirements of the market. Today's continuing success in the development of miniaturization of executive drives with scaling down modern electro-mechanical, electro-hydraulic and electro-pneumatic components features with keeping reasonable balance between the aforementioned contradictions and customized specification figures of the end products. But the sufficient market growth, thereof, requires the creation of new types of mini executive drives, which must feature with: reduced vulnerability of their control parts to aforesaid stimuli, and with keeping the high value of transmission capacity Nr (kw./lb) of their executive parts. Thus, the said control part should be of hydraulic and/or pneumatic nature with a few, if any, electric elements. And evidently, the high value of transmission capacity shall be kept in the embodiments of a new generation of mini scaled executive pneumatic or, preferably, hydraulic drives. This approach is beneficial for the following reasons:

Development of MEMS-Micro fluidics will obviously result in the creation of a Microfluidic Platform (MFP) where the input signal of any physical, chemical, or biological origin is converted into a hydraulic or pneumatic output signal.

There has been discovered the possibility for the creation of an Interface Transducer (IT) that converts very effectively a weak output hydraulic or pneumatic signal (like a signal from MFP) into a relatively powerful hydraulic signal, capable of activating a valve-type hydraulically operated control unit (CU) of a mini H/P-D.

Such a conversion with simultaneous scaling up of signals are illustrated by Figure 1, where MFP optionally contains nano and micro scaled components (positions 1, 2, and 3). An IT is created on the basis of differently scaled innovative Jet Pneumatic-Hydraulic (JPHA) and/or Jet Hydraulic-Hydraulic (JHHA) Amplifiers-Converters (positions 4, 5, and 6). And hydraulically operated valve-type CU (position 7) is interfaced with MFP directly by JPHA or JHHA. As this interfacing is really possible now, for the first time there appears the opportunity for the creation of such a miniaturized modular assembly that includes all the necessary components to operate mini H/P-D by nano/micro scaled signal of various origins. Figure 2 shows the general layout of such a would-be Microfluidic Modular Assembly (MiFluMA), which additionally might have the very important alternative feature of activating mini H/P-D directly by MFP thru JPHA or JHHA.

Benefits of the IT in the innovative embodiments of JPHA or JHHA are as follows:

Does not require moving mechanical parts (positions 4, 5, and 6);

Reveals high values of pressure kp and flow rate kq gains;

Reveals high value of pressure recovery coefficient kpr, see Table 1.

Since pure fluidic amplifiers of previous generations did not possess those operational performances,^[4,5,6] there is the need for an innovative technology of origination such Interface Transducers (IT)^[7]. For the creation of a new generation of pure fluidic JPHA and JHHA, it has been developed the novel methodology, based upon the following:

Method of Interface Control of Interacting Flows (ICIF method) that provides for designing and manufacturing of customized embodiments of JPHA where a weak pneumatic signal from MFP is being converted into relatively enhanced hydraulic signal.^[8]

Method of Attract-to-Merge Control (AMC method) that enables engineering of customized embodiments of JHHA where weak hydraulic and/or auxiliary pneumatic signals from MFP are being converted into a relatively enhanced hydraulic signal.^[9]

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