Effect of Zonal Hydraulics on Energy Consumption and Boom Structure of a Micro-Excavator

Abinab Niraula, Shuzhong Zhang, Tatiana Minav and Matti Pietola
Additional contact information
Abinab Niraula: Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Aalto University, 14400 Espoo, Finland
Shuzhong Zhang: School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou 350118, China
Tatiana Minav: Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Aalto University, 14400 Espoo, Finland
Matti Pietola: Department of Mechanical Engineering, School of Engineering, Aalto University, 14400 Espoo, Finland

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-22

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of extra weight caused by the Direct Driven Hydraulics (DDH) in a micro-excavator. These projects are investigating the implementation of zonal or decentralized hydraulics for non-road mobile machinery (NRMM) and stationary industrial applications. The benefit of DDH is the combination of electric and hydraulic technologies in a compact package compared to conventional hydraulics, which enables a reduction of potential leakage points, flexible tubing, and boosting of the system efficiency due to switching to direct pump control instead of a loss-generating conventional valve-based control. In order to demonstrate these benefits for the excavator case, this paper proposes a system model approach to assess and predict energy consumption of the zonal hydraulics approach implemented with DDH in various working cycles, complemented by a structural analysis. The finite element analysis utilized for this demonstrated that the extra weight and selected location of DDH units do not negatively affect the structure of the excavator. Simulation results demonstrated that the energy consumption is approximately 15% higher with extra weight added by the three DDH units. Although approximately 20% more regeneration energy is produced, taking into account the regeneration energy, the increases in energy consumption are about 12%.

Keywords: hydraulic excavator; hydraulic drives; electric drives; efficiency; losses; zonal hydraulics; direct driven hydraulics; off-road mobile machinery; energy consumption; finite element analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/8/2088/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/8/2088/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:8:p:2088-:d:163128

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().