Investigation of the Energy Consumption of Hydraulic Excavator Using One Proportional Valve based on the Independent Metering Valve Circuit

In this paper, a new configuration of the independent metering valve system (IMV) is proposed for the hydraulic excavator. In contrast to the conventional-IMV configuration uses four 2-way 2-position (2/2) proportional valves, the proposed configuration uses one 2-way 2-position proportional valve and combines with two 4-way 3-position directional valves to operate the hydraulic excavator according to five metering modes designed on the IMV system. Additionally, the coordinated control of the pump and the valve is applied to improve the tracking performance and energy-saving of the proposed system. The results obtained by the co-simulation model on the AMESim/MATLAB software confirmed the energy consumption of the new configuration has the same result as the CIMV system. Consequently, the proposed configuration not only achieves high energy efficiency as IMV systems but also saves investment costs when it uses a single proportional valve in the system.