Energy Efficient Pneumatics: Aspects of Control and Systems Theory

As the public call for increasing efforts in achieving the global climate protection goals intensifies, discussions about the efficient use of resources and energy are on the daily agenda. As many other areas, the industry has seen itself facing growing concerns about the long neglected environmental aspects. Since a large proportion of the energy in production is used by pneumatic drives, this survey paper exclusively focuses on pneumatics in handling and automation technology and presents the most common components, followed by multiple model-based strategies to increase energy efficiency in modern production plants. First, single units are studied extensively and methods for design and energy efficient control are presented. Since in production lines pneumatic drives are generally operated in large networks, the second part focuses on energy efficient strategies at plant level. These include an optimized adjustment of the supply pressure, a cascaded air usage, and an automated adaptive control pattern. Care is taken to ensure that the considered approaches are applicable in today’s industrial plants, which is demonstrated by experiments in a production line. The experimental findings show the immense potential of the discussed measures in the form of compressed air savings of more than 60% compared to the industry standard.