Lightweight & Smart: Revolutionizing Hydraulic Tubing with Advanced Sensors

Hydraulic systems are the backbone of industrial machinery, yet their effectiveness and dependability rely heavily on continuous monitoring. Conventional monitoring systems often provided additional weight and complexity to the units with dedicated sensors and wiring. However, we are seeing a more unobtrusive revolution in the form of adding lightweight, smart sensors directly into the hydraulic tubing.

This transformation is not just about small. It is about smart, efficient, and reliable.

Challenges with Traditional Sensors: The Weight of Tradition
Before we can get into the advantages of smartembedded sensors, it helps to understand the limits of traditional setups:

Mass and Weight: Traditional sensor setups often require heavy housings, mounting brackets, and long cabling. This matters in any applications where mass is an issue such as mobile hydraulics, robotics, or aerospace space where every gram counts.

Difficulty of Installation: The process of attaching and connecting separate sensors is time-consuming, introduces additional opportunities for errors, and requires specialized skills. Also, every connection is a potential point of failure.

Inflexible Placement: Conventional sensing technology, though it may be flexible in some regards, is often limited by size and attachment methods that constrain the implementation. It is important when using sensors to collect data, that you mount it at the most optimal location to get good insights and not introduce bias.

Signal Interference: There may be issues with long runs of cable that may introduce electromagnetic interference (EMI) that could corrupt the data supplied by a sensor. This may happen when the sensor is in a challenging industrial environment.

Price: Assembling and pricing the conventional sensor package, with sensor, mounting hardware, wiring, and installation labor adds up quickly.

The Emergence of Smart, Integrated Sensors

Consider a hydraulic tube that serves as not only a simple line for fluid but also a smart data line. This could be achieved by using lightweight, smart sensors that are embedded into, or integrated with, the tubing. These would not be mere temperature or pressure gauges – they would be miniaturized, data-rich data-collection points often equipped with wireless innovations and edge computing.

Beneficial Innovations:

• Miniaturization and Weight:

The weight of the unit is significantly decreased by locating sensors directly into the tube material or if they are ultra-compact and flush-mounted into the tube. This is especially valuable for mobile applications, drones, and any product that requires a power-to-weight factor.

Less material equals less cost and simplicity of the sensor construction.

• Location of Data Measurement:

Sensors can be introduced right where measurements are most critical, as they can be located directly where there is a bend, valve, or right after the pump. This provides a much higher accuracy data point for pressure, temperature, flow, and even vibration as it allows for a “real-time” fluid behavior snapshot.

It’s also much easier to find earlier anomalies (a spike in pressure or localized overheating).

• Simplified Installation and Maintenance:

Plug-and-play installation: When a tube segment is replaced, the sensor is a part of it, which makes maintenance simple.

Less wiring: Many new smart sensors are wireless (for example, Bluetooth Low Energy, LoRaWAN) and therefore, a lot of the problematic cabling and connectors are eliminated. This simplifies installation and thus reduces installation time and costs - often significantly. Plus, it removes two opportunities for signal degradation and failure due to wiring.

Better predictive maintenance:

When better data allows for more detailed and accurate reporting, it dramatically improves the ability to predict when an issue or failure will occur. For example, if we see anomalies in the pressure profiles or changes in temperature (noticing even the subtle changes), we can be aware of the potential for a leak, filter clog, or pump degradation well in advance of an issue.

This completely changes our maintenance approach from reactive (fix after breakdown) to genuinely predictive, which allows us to minimize downtime and maximize operational uptime.

• Energy efficiency and performance optimization:

Real-time data from these sensors can connect directly with the hydraulics system's control unit, allowing for dynamic adjustments to pump speeds, valve actuation, and cooling units in relation to real and instantaneous conditions.

For example, if pressure is known accurately, a variable displacement pump can be informed to deliver only the pressure/flow that is required, rather than always pumping excessively, which saves energy costs for being over-pumped.

By monitoring oil viscosity (inference from temperature and pressure), we can be sure that the fluid is always at peak performance.

Capabilities in Edge Computing:

Some advanced smart sensors are able to perform simple data processing at the source ("at the edge"). This could be filtering out noise, compressing data, or even performing a basic anomaly detection prior to sending the information. This can ease the burden on central processing units, while saving bandwidth on wireless systems.

The Future is Integrated

It is undeniable that there is a trend towards lighter, smarter, and more integrated components in today’s engineering disciplines. In the case of hydraulic systems, integrating intelligence into the tubing is a significant step forward. Not only does it open the door to weight savings, it represents a potential future in which hydraulic systems are self-aware, continuously optimizing their performance, predicting their own maintenance needs, and working efficiently and reliably at levels that humans cannot obtain today. This is not just an evolution in technology, but a re-imagining of how hydraulic systems will be designed, operated, and maintained in the next several decades.