Multiplicative valve to control many cylinders

This paper presents a multiplicative valve design that allows mn hydraulic cylinders to be controlled by m+n actuators. For example, 100 cylinders could be controlled using a multiplicative valve block with 20 actuators. That can be thought of as having 20 valves controlling 100 ports. This is accomplished by using a row-column structure. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Semi-Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (SNMF) have been shown to enable simultaneous control when using a row-column structure. However, the SVD and SNMF methods require the input to each system in the row-column structure to be a product of the row and column inputs. The multiplicative valve design presented in this paper can physically realize this row-column multiplication. It uses two actuators to vary each orifice area. We give an experimental result for a 2 × 2 grid of uni-directional valves that validates the multiplicative relationship. We extend the design to bi-directional valves for use with either the SNMF or SVD methods. A simulation demonstrates the use of the bi-directional valve to control 9 hydraulic cylinders in a 3 × 3 grid using the SNMF method.