Performance of Proportional Flow Valve With Pilot Pressure Drop—Spool Opening Compensation

Abstract

Flow control valves are extensively used to control the motion of hydraulic actuators in industry. In this paper, a two-stage proportional flow control valve with pilot digital pressure compensator is presented. The proposed valve is composed of two pressure sensors, a proportional pilot valve, a Valvistor poppet valve (main stage), and an electronic controller. The pressure drop across the pilot valve metering orifice is detected by two pressure sensors and fed into the controller which changes the pilot valve input voltage to compensate pressure influence on the outlet flow. The presented valve is investigated theoretically by simplified analytical models as well as numerical methods and also evaluated experimentally. The results show that the proposed scheme is feasible. It has a reasonable static performance and an acceptable dynamic characteristic for low bandwidth disturbances. The flow force on the Valvistor poppet should be estimated and considered in the controller design.