New Management Strategy for a Significant Reduction of the Impact on CO2 Footprint of Hydraulic Actuators

Nowadays, the design and the management of industrial machinery and plants must keep into account the energy sustainability issue. As a matter of fact, the Sustainable Development Goal 9 of the United Nations (SDG9) “Industry, innovation and infrastructure” refers to efficiency and optimization of the energy usage as one of the key-points for a sustainable production system. Hence, the engineering design process must consider energy sustainability. In the context of industrial machinery, the actuators are the components that mostly use energy to perform the function that the machine is designed for; they are unavoidably characterized by energy wasting, even more if they are hydraulic actuators. The paper precisely deals with a management and control method conceived by the authors aimed at the reduction of the energy consumption of hydraulic actuators. The method is based on an estimate of the supply pressure required by the hydraulic system and on an innovative unconventional usage of a servo-valve as the component devoted to the control of such pressure. The paper demonstrates, through the simulation of a real work-cycle, that this innovative usage of a servo-valve for supply pressure regulation purposes, is a successful solution for the CO2 footprint reduction of hydraulic servo-axes.