Energy Savings through Adaptive Upstream Throttling and Supply Shut‐Off on Downstream Throttled Drives.

In pneumatic automation, downstream throttled pneumatic drives are widely used to perform motion tasks because of their low cost, robustness, and high power density. However, this drive technology is generally regarded as having a large energy saving potential. Hence, multiple researchers have proposed control strategies aiming to improve the efficiency of systems using pneumatic drives. However, most of those developments increase the system complexity and commissioning efforts, which hinders a broad application. This paper presents alternatively a simple to implement energy‐saving measure, which relies on a novel energy‐saving speed controller. Furthermore, a design method for the controller is proposed and subsequently analyzed using a lumped parameter model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]