Hydraulic equipment

Hydraulic machines are machinery and tools that use liquid fluid power to do simple work. Heavy equipment is a common example.

In this type of machine, hydraulic fluid is transmitted throughout the machine to various hydraulic motors and hydraulic cylinders and becomes pressurised according to the resistance present. The fluid is controlled directly or automatically by control valves and distributed through hoses and tubes.

The popularity of hydraulic machinery is due to the very large amount of power that can be transferred through small tubes and flexible hoses, and the high power density and wide array of actuators that can make use of this power.

Hydraulic machinery is operated by the use of hydraulics, where a liquid is the powering medium.

A fundamental feature of hydraulic systems is the ability to apply force or torque multiplication in an easy way, independent of the distance between the input and output, without the need for mechanical gears or levers, either by altering the effective areas in two connected cylinders or the effective displacement (cc/rev) between a pump and motor. In normal cases, hydraulic ratios are combined with a mechanical force or torque ratio for optimum machine designs such as boom movements and trackdrives for an excavator.

Cylinder C1 is one inch in radius, and cylinder C2 is ten inches in radius. If the force exerted on C1 is 10 lbf, the force exerted by C2 is 1000 lbf because C2 is a hundred times larger in area (S = πr²) as C1. The downside to this is that you have to move C1 a hundred inches to move C2 one inch. The most common use for this is the classical hydraulic jack where a pumping cylinder with a small diameter is connected to the lifting cylinder with a large diameter.

If a hydraulic rotary pump with the displacement 10 cc/rev is connected to a hydraulic rotary motor with 100 cc/rev, the shaft torque required to drive the pump is 10 times less than the torque available at the motor shaft, but the shaft speed (rev/min) for the motor is 10 times less than the pump shaft speed. This combination is actually the same type of force multiplication as the cylinder example (1) just that the linear force in this case is a rotary force, defined as torque.

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