REALIZATION OF PROGRAMMABLE CONTROL USING A SET OF INDIVIDUALLY CONTROLLED ELECTROHYDRAULIC VALVES

Abstract

This paper reports a study of electrohydraulic valve function programmability and characteristic interchangeability using a set of individually controlled cartridge type electrohydraulic (E/H) control valves. Such an integrated individu-ally controllable E/H valve is defined as the programmable E/H control valve. A hybrid control algorithm was devel-oped to realize different valve functions via programmable logic and to realize different interchangeable valve charac-teristics via a programmable valve modulation function. Evaluation test results verified that the programmable E/H con-trol valve was capable of replacing different types of conventional proportional control valves and, more importantly, capable of realizing the flow regeneration function. The programmability of the programmable E/H control valve pro-vides the flexibility of using the same firmware of an E/H control valve on various applications by simply downloading different control software.