Comment by jmaw
7 hours ago
I'm not super familiar with heavy equipment like dozers and such, but some of them may also have a single motor to pressurize hydraulic fluid and valves to articulate the various pistons. So may be able to make the argument there too
In that case, the valves/pistons pairs are all independent actuators. The hydraulic motor is more a constant power source for all of them.
Yeah, the analogy for drones is hydraulic piston -> electric motor and hydraulic pump -> battery
That is common and you can't run two different cylinders at the same time. Depends on how the pump and valves are plumbed of course. Sometimes you can run more than one but you split power.
That sounds like it could be solved with more valves.
it's not that easy.
You can run your cylinders in parallel, however that means whichever cylinder has its easiest time moving is going to capture a proportion more share of the power. If things are not perfectly balanced, which in reality they're never going to be, that means the cylinder that needs to work the hardest is going to work the least. And so it's going to take a huge amount of effort to control.
Alternatively, you can run your cylinders in series, however that means that if you're trying to feather one to move slow, all the others are going to have to move slower too.
You end up needing multiple pumps in order to make this work well, but pumps are rather expensive and so that's going to bring your costs up. Plus, multiple pumps mean that you're going to potentially want more power than your motor can deliver.
All the above can be solved with careful engineering. However, engineering is expensive too in order to get this right and it's going to take a lot of work.
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Almost everything can be improved by making it cost more.
Or more power ;)