Performance Analysis of Directional Control Valve: An Overview

Directional control valves start, stop or change the direction of flow in compressed air applications. To understand the different applications of compressed air and how valves are used, one must first have knowledge of the kinds and types of valves used by industries. This paper studies local valve control of the electro-hydraulic system. The slow response of hydraulic control valve usually becomes the hold-up of whole system performance. Although fast valves (e.g. high-bandwidth servo-valves) are available, they are far more expensive than slow valves (e.g. proportional directional control valves). To improve the performance of proportional directional control valves, three different types of controllers are synthesized. Firstly, based on the pole zero cancellation technique, an open loop compensator is designed which requires the accurate valve dynamic model information; Secondly, a full state feedback adaptive robust controller (ARC) is synthesized, which effectively takes into account the effect of parametric uncertainties and uncertain nonlinearities such as friction force and flow force. Finally, an output feedback ARC controller is synthesized to address the problem of un measurable states. Keywords: valve, hydraulic device, Simulink.