Hydraulics Blog

In engineering, every technology can perform certain functions in varying degrees of compliance to requirements. It is important to have the right tool to do a job, and in certain cases, there are things that hydraulics can do best. the economics of technologies changes over time, so that can change what competing technologies get applied, based purely on cost.. but there will always be times when the most merited technology gets applied appropriately to the problems being solved, when cost is not a factor.

so it will not go away completely.

chris

There will always be niche areas where hydraulics are the best choice, just like there are still places where it makes sense to use a team of oxen.

I very much doubt that it will ever be replaced, i work in the industry and there are so many new applications for the uses of hydraulics versus other systems. Believe it or not there is still the ability to build a hydraulic system that is extremely simple and effective to do a multitude of jobs. When you start using electromechanical systems it stars getting extremely complicated, circuit board, wiring, servos, electric motors etc.. Only needs one little wire/ diode, resistor and can be so small that you can see the fault to stop an entire system from working..

I find a lot of systems these days hydraulic and electro mechanical both have been made way too over complicated all in the name of "Making it more user friendly"

The days of move this lever to make that move are far from gone. All you need is a form of drive, a simple gear pump, a lever valve a couple of pipes/hoses and an actuator.

The newer systems are batteries, circuit boards (hundreds if not thousands of tiny parts), wirings(metres of it) more circuits boards and more motors all to push a rod..

All looks the same but when you lay it all out.. Simple old hydraulics works just as well and its fairly easy to fix/understand...

My thoughts only..

We use both electro mechanical and hydraulic solutions extensively. Electro mechanical is generally preferred if only because it the positioning and movements are far more predictable HOWEVER hydraulic often HAVE to be used because hydraulics can handle heavy loads far easier than most electro-mechanical and they can be more economic (when you have one system that has to be hydraulic then other functions can usually be added on easily and cheaply).

The only heavy lifting / lowering option that electro-mechanical has that can compete with hydraulic is winching and in some instances that either just doesn't compute or is too expensive (winching obviously also has benefits over long distances, say above 5m although we have hydraulic cylinders up to 18m!). Hydraulics have some fundamental benefits that will never be overcome by electro-mechanical.

You need to also consider the mechanical limits of the technology as it's available today. I recently visited a company that makes very specialized hydraulic presses up to hundreds of tons capacity, and with a high level of motion control. I'm pretty sure making a single electromechanical actuator for those kinds of loads would be prohibitively expensive compared to hydraulics.