Design of pilot-assisted load control valve with load velocity control ability and fast opening feature

Abstract

This article presents a design of pilot-assisted load control valve with load velocity control ability and fast opening feature based on static and dynamic modeling. Traditional load control valves do not have the load velocity control ability and its opening feature is very poor because the high spring stiffness comes along with the pressure–spring balance–based principle. Some improvement has been done by employing a two-stage pressure–pressure balance principle to make a load control valve to achieve load velocity control ability while the opening feature was not improved much. In this design, another pressure–pressure balance principle is proposed to make the load control valve achieve load velocity control ability and fast opening closing feature at the same time. Static modeling method based on force balance and Bernoulli orifice pressure-flow equation is used to design the load velocity control ability of the valve. Dynamic modeling method based on Newton’s second law and fluid continuity equation is used to optimize the parameters to give the proposed load control valve a fast opening feature. An actual load control valve was developed according to the above methods and the test results show both good load velocity control ability and fast opening feature of the design, which validates the potentiality of the proposed design in many applications.