Oil Stiction in Fast Switching Annular Seat Valves for Digital Displacement Fluid Power Machines

Digital Displacement (DD) fluid power machines utilizes electronically controlled seat valves connected to pressure chambers to obtain variable displacement with high operational efficiency and high bandwidth. To achieve high efficiency, fast valve switching is essential and all aspects related to the dynamic behaviour of the seat valves must be considered to optimize the machine efficiency. A significant effect influencing the valves switching performance is the presence of oil stiction when separating the contact surfaces in valve opening movement. This oil stiction force is limited by cavitation for low pressure levels, e.g. valves connected to the low pressure manifold, however for valves operated at higher pressure levels, the oil stiction force is dominating when the separating surfaces are close to contact.
This paper presents an analytic solution to the oil stiction force for annular seat valves suitable for DD applications based on the Reynolds equation and considers contact surface curvature and attack angle. A dynamic cavitation zone is included in the stiction model, and cavitation is found to be present even for seat valves surrounded by high pressure levels.