A review of electro-hydraulic servovalve research and development

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a review of the state of the art of electro-hydraulic servovalves, which are widely used valves in industrial applications and aerospace, being key components for closed-loop electro-hydraulic motion control systems. The paper discusses their operating principles and the analytical models used to study these valves. Commercially available units are also analysed in detail, reporting the performance levels achieved by current servovalves in addition to discussing their advantages and drawbacks. A detailed analysis of research that investigates these valves via computational fluid-dynamic analysis is also provided. Research studies on novel control systems and novel configurations based on the use of smart materials, which aim to improve performance or reduce cost, are also analysed in detail.

KEYWORDS:

• Review
• servovalve
• control
• piezoelectric actuator

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paolo Tamburrano

Paolo Tamburrano, PhD, is a mechanical engineer. As of July 2018, he is a Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Bath and an assistant professor at the Polytechnic University of Bari. He received the doctorate degree from the Polytechnic University of Bari with dissertation of the thesis titled ‘Fluid dynamic design optimization of mechanical and energy systems’. His research interests regard servovalves, proportional valves, piezo actuators, renewable energies, gas turbines, combined cycles, ORC, heat exchangers, internal combustion engines, cyclone separators. To date, he is co-author of more than 30 papers indexed in Scopus.

Andrew R. Plummer

Professor Andrew R. Plummer received his PhD from the University of Bath in 1991, for research into control of electro-hydraulic systems. He worked as a research engineer for Thales from 1990, developing flight simulator control technology, before joining the University of Leeds in 1994. From 1999 until 2006 he was global control systems R&D manager for Instron, manufacturers of materials and structural testing systems. He is now Director of the Centre for Power Transmission and Motion Control, University of Bath, and has published 160 papers in the field of motion and force control, many relating to electro-hydraulic servo-systems. Prof. Plummer is Past Chair of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Mechatronics Informatics and Control Group and also the UK Automatic Control Council, and is Associate Editor of both the International Journal of Fluid Power and Control Engineering Practice. He is Chair of the Global Fluid Power Society.

Elia Distaso

Elia Distaso was born in Foggia on 5 July 1989. Graduated with honors in Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic of Bari (Italy) in 2013, defending a Master’s Thesis based on an experimental work carried out at the FCA Research Center in Foggia (Italy). At the beginning of 2017, he received his PhD from Polytechnic of Bari (Italy). From 2014 to 2016, he worked as Honorary Associate/Fellow (visiting scholar) at the Engine Research Center of University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, were he worked on soot modelling under the guidance of Emeritus Professor Rolf D. Reitz. He is currently a post-doc fellow at the Polytechnic of Bari and his research activities concern the study of the combustion and emission formation processes, the analysis and the design of energy generation and heat-exchange systems, the experimental and numerical analysis of multi-phases flows with applications in the design of proportional valves by means of optimisation techniques.

Riccardo Amirante

Professor Riccardo Amirante received the first degree (5 years) with honours in Civil Engineering during Academic Years 1991/92 and the PhD in ‘Machine engineering’ in 1997, both from the Polytechnic University of Bari. He has been assistant professor at the University of Molise since from 1996 and is assistant professor of Energy systems, Internal Combustion Engines and Turbomachinery at the Polytechnic University of Bari from 2000. He has been associate professor from 2012 and full professor from 2017. Initially his research interests are in the field of fluid-dynamic design problems applied to horizontal centrifugal separators and with their applications to industrial process. During this period, he obtained the first national prize for the better scientific paper about olive oil industry. Successively his research interests are in the field of Hydraulic transmissions, and he is actually first manager of Hydraulic and Pneumatic Laboratory Department. He strongly cooperated in many national research projects. During the last years, he teaches many courses in University of Molise and Polytechnic University di Bari: Fluid Automation, Hydraulic transmissions, Agro alimentary machineries and plants, Energy systems, and so on. He is co-author of about 100 papers, most of which presented at international conferences or published in international journals.