Particle-excitation flow-control valve using piezo vibration-improvement for a high flow rate and research on controllability

This paper describes an improved particle-excitation flow-control valve with high flow rate and controllability. The proposed control valve has a small volume, is lightweight, and can smoothly control the airflow through particle excitation. Pneumatic actuators, which have many advantages, are widely used in automation machine equipment and are expected to be used in robots. In general, such highly controllable pneumatic-control devices used as proportional valves are large-scale, heavy, and exhibit low response. We have developed a new flow-control valve called a particle-excitation flow-control valve, which has a simple structure with a lead zirconium titanate (PZT) resonance mode, large control-flow rate, and is lightweight. Further, this valve is expected to be highly responsive because it is driven by a PZT vibrator. In this study, we designed an experimental prototype to increase the maximum flow rate and measured its flow control and response characteristics. Moreover, we showed that this control valve has high controllability and control flow rate.