Energy regenerative hose-free pneumatic actuator.

Pneumatic actuators in general require an air-compressor, valves, and pneumatic hoses. This makes them difficult to be used on mobile apparatus. To solve this problem, we previously developed a new gas source that uses the electrolysis/synthesis of water through an ion-exchange membrane. The developed gas source uses a gas/liquid reversible chemical reaction and controls the generation/absorption of gas through an electric current supplied to the membrane. In this paper, we present a control method for the energy-regeneration cycle and perform theoretical and experimental studies to verify its power consumption. This energy-regeneration control method is applied to an actuator, and it works successfully with a power consumption improvement of approximately 20% compared to that without energy-regeneration. Furthermore, we successfully develop a hose-free pneumatic rubber actuator with this control method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]