The target application of this study is hydraulic excavators, which are one of the most common machines found at construction sites across the world. Road constructions and improvements, laying operation of cables or pipes and building can be seen in urban areas and digging and dumping operations of natural resource are done in country regions. For the construction site in urban areas, mini hydraulic excavators with operating weights up to 6 tons are often used and they make up more than 60% of the total hydraulic excavators market [1].
In recent years, a number of new system architectures for mobile hydraulic systems have been proposed. Examples of such improved architectures are displacement control, transformer systems and valve controlled systems with multiple pressure rails. For these systems, electronic controls are always used. Although these new methods are promising, they cannot be applied to mini-excavators, because today’s mini-hydraulic excavators do not use electronic controls as this would increase costs and make the system complex. Therefore, the goal of this study is to propose a fully hydro-mechanical valve controlled constant pressure system, which can be applied to mini-excavators in the future.
This paper begins by introducing the details of this novel hydraulic system and shows its advantages. Using a simulation model of an 18 ton excavator, it is confirmed that the novel system functions well and the energy efficiency is compared to a conventional Load Sensing system. The simulation results show that the novel system can save 22% and 24% of fuel in leveling and 90° dig-dump cycles respectively.
