Development of a piezoelectric high speed on/off valve and its application to pneumatic closed-loop position control system

The use of smart materials-based high speed on/off valve has exhibited the potential to replace traditional servo and proportional valves in fluid power systems. In this paper, a novel pneumatic high speed on/off valve driven by a piezoelectric stack actuator is developed and its dynamics are studied. For an upstream gauge pressure of 0.5 MPa, the valve exhibited a large flow rate of up to 86 L/min. Furthermore, to study the ability of this novel high speed on/off valve to be applied in closed-loop control systems, a real-time position control system is realized using a PID controller. In order to prove its feasibility and effectiveness, a number of closed-loop trajectory tracking experiments are conducted on a pneumatic cylinder. The system is proved feasible and the results demonstrate good tracking performance.