Pneumatic flow control valve using particle excitation by PZT transducer

This paper reports a flow control valve for pneumatic actuators. This flow control valve has a lightweight and simple structure using particle excitation by PZT transducer, which is driven at resonance mode and it can be used as a variable speed controller for pneumatic actuators. A PZT transducer has been used for controlling flow rate in this study. The flow control valve in this report consists of an orifice plate, a PZT transducer which is fixed on the orifice plate with the bolt, and the iron particles of 0.8 mm diameter. From the experiments of flowing quantity evaluation, this flow control valve achieves a maximum flow rate of 62.65 L/min under applying voltage of 79.9 V_p-p and air pressure of 0.70 MPa. The results show that the ratio of the flow capacity /valve weight is about ten times larger than that of typical commercial valves.