I'm not sure if such a thing exists, but I just thought of it and want to know if it would work and what industrial legos are needed to test it.
The problem: Due to back problems I wanted an air mattress with fine control of pressure in specific parts that varies by program through the night. I found a 40 chamber mattress that would take 40 1/4"ID plastic airlines. I did not want to also have to wire up 40 solenoid valves, or 40 air pumps along with the 40 pressure sensors.
The potential solution: Use 1 air pump, 1 digital control proportional flow control solenoid valve, and 40 N/C reed spring valves.
I'm not sure of the terminology so help my Google fu by correcting me.
Instead of operating the solenoid valve at a constant frequency and varying duty cycle, it would have a fixed 50% duty cycle (hopefully sine like flow variations), and vary the frequency over the widest reliable range. Probably a needle valve attached to a speaker voice coil is closer to what I need. Is there an industry term for that?
What I called 40 N/C reed spring valves aren't really reed valves because I think they all need identical cv and port geometry, like the valves on a flute. But the arms holding the 'caps' closed are leaf springs, each a different length, thus a different resonant frequency. Or maybe I'm wrong about that and they need to be regular reed valves to operate properly with lower frequency reeds flowing more volume. In which case... I don't really know. Not my field. Maybe we need a 2nd solenoid for dynamic per frequency pressure control.
Principle of operation: Based on the programmed pressure map and feedback from mems pressure sensors, the solenoid operates at the resonant frequency of a specific reed valve connected to a chamber that needs to increase pressure. Being resonant, it flows more than all the others leaving less manifold pressure to push open the other valves. The digital controller sweeps through the frequencies of any valve connected to a chamber that is low. If a chamber is over pressured and needs to be reduced, its frequency is applied, but at a lower duty cycle. That should produce a lower manifold pressure than the chamber, but still operate the reed valve at low amplitude.
This isn't positive valve control, its dynamic. There will be leakage. Harmonics will open unintended valves, solenoid nonlinearities will produce aberant frequency content. Hopefully the electronic control loop is fast enough to compensate at the cost of longer than optimal pump run time per correction. The lowest frequency valve will probably need a static dump pressure regulator set to the lowest anticipated pressure.
Other applications: off road vehicle suspension, Stewart platform (simulator motion platform), single human transport off camber suspension(Segway, wheelchair, trike). Keep a wheelchair seat level while going crosswise down a hill.
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