6/18/2012 By Chad Garland
Written by By Chad Garland
A pair of portable fluid power demonstrators, which look a little like sandbox excavator toys mounted on large black boxes, use water pumped through a series of tubes and into hydraulic cylinders to operate construction-yellow, miniature excavator bucket arms.
“The way the cylinders are arranged is the same as that of a large-scale excavator system,” said Tim Deppen (B.S./M.S. Mechanical Engineering ‘09), Mechanical Engineering graduate student. “But we’re using water instead of oil because it’s safer in case it leaks.”
The Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power (CCEFP), a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center, developed the demonstrators at Purdue University as part of an educational outreach program and then distributed kits to the six other CCEFP partner universities, including the University of Illinois, Deppen said. MechSE students built the demonstrators and began using them for the Engineering Open House exhibit three years ago, he said.
Deppen said CCEFP also funds research projects on campus that focus on making fluid power more efficient through development of better pumps, hydraulic oils, and other elements of fluid power systems.
With instruction and help from Deppen and other Mechanical Engineering students, young visitors used the demonstrators’ manual controls to contract or extend the hydraulic cylinders that move the buckets, in order to transport Styrofoam peanuts from one plastic bin to another.
“It’s not very intuitive, so one of the [CCEFP-funded] projects is to develop a better system for control,” Deppen said.
Another research project funded through CCEFP involves a fluid-powered ankle-foot orthotic designed to help patients who have lost the ability to move their feet up and down. Carbon-dioxide gas powers a piston that operates an actuator attached to the orthotic, moving the wearer’s foot up and down as they walk.
Claire Vogel, a senior at Bradley University whose senior project is to create the actuator, came to Engineering Open House because she is working with a CCEFP-funded team at the University of Illinois.
“The problem they’ve encountered is the tank doesn’t last as long as they want it to. It gets really, really cold really fast, then freezes,” Vogel said. “We’ve been doing some testing with carbon dioxide tanks, looking at ways to hopefully maintain a temperature at which it doesn’t freeze and then hopefully it would give a little more power.”
Deppen said a video displayed at the exhibit also highlighted more of the research related to the orthotic and other developments, such as a surface that repels water. He said the exhibit is designed to show K-12 students what fluid power is used for and to get them excited about future fluid power applications.