Standards Development

Scope

This document deals with the energy efficiency improvement and optimization of pneumatic cylinder systems.

This document provides general procedures and calculation methods for assessing the air consumption of pneumatic cylinder systems to enable the system designer to make a comparison with other solutions or cylinder technologies. The standard takes into account pneumatic cylinders and the tubing between solenoid valves and cylinders, as these components determine the systems air consumption.

Clause 6, Clause 7 and Clause 8 of this standard may be used independently from each other. In this way it is possible to only determine the most energy efficient cylinder or to only calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) per cycle or to do the complete analysis by complete application of the standard.

NOTE Compressor, central compressed air preparation and the distribution of compressed air usually already exist and are not addressed in this publication. The calculations of this standard in Clause 6 through Clause 8 therefore start at the control valve of the cylinder.

The choice of the cylinder has no significant effect, if the following two conditions are fulfilled:

—     the filling volume of the cylinder is small compared to the volume of the tubing or piping and

—     reducing the volume of the tubing or piping is not reasonably possible.

In this case, the optimization described in Clause 6 can be omitted and Clause 7 and/or Clause 8 can be used.