Development of a Novel High Pressure Electronic Pneumatic Pressure Reducing Valve

Pressure reducing valve (PRV) is one of the critical components in high pressure pneumatic systems. Nowadays, manually operated PRVs have been widely used, but there is still no universal electronic PRV. Thus, we proposed a novel high pressure electronic pneumatic pressure reducing valve (EPPRV) whose inlet pressure (pi) is up to 31.5 MPa. The EPPRV mainly consists of a poppet structured pilot valve and a piston structured main valve. A proportional electromagnet was used as the command element, and a pressure closed loop, rather than a force closed loop controller, was designed. First, the mechanical design and functionality of the EPPRV are carefully analyzed. Then, a mathematical model is built up, and the working characteristics of pressure, flow rate, and frequency response are simulated. Finally, the test bench is introduced, and detailed experiments are carried out. Simulated and experimental results are highly consistent within output pressure (po) ranging from 8 MPa to 25 MPa and load flow rate (qld) ranging from 60 g/s to 650 g/s, which verifies the feasibility of the novel structure and the validity of the mathematic model.