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Radial piston pump features digital control

A Moog product story

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Jan 5, 2005

The latest version of the popular RKP radial piston pump features digital control and a fieldbus interface.

Moog has released a new version of its popular RKP radial piston pump with digital control and a fieldbus interface.

Moog has significantly improved the control technology of the well-known RKP pump with the addition of a new proportional pilot valve with digital onboard electronics for flow and pressure regulation, tuning, and diagnostics.

The new digital RKP was the result of a major research and development effort that enabled performance and system optimisation never before possible with a servopump.

Moog's new RKP pump can be digitally controlled via a CANopen interface or run as a purely analogue device (controlled by analogue command signals).

This provides maximum flexibility for compatibility with several PLC architectures.

Customers can use an additional analogue voltage signal to select up to 16 different parameter sets to adapt the pump behaviour to the different operational conditions that occur in a machine cycle.

These parameter sets include the setting of the pressure regulator, defining operational modes (master-slave, hybrid), and selecting pressure sensors.

Adjustments are made using either the human machine interface (HMI) or a laptop with the Moog Valve Configuration Software, a MS Windows based free software available on the Moog website.

When compared with a traditional pump, this new pump provides the unique ability, to operate each cylinder in a serial machine process exactly with the pump parameters it requires.

This allows users to optimise their system performance considerably and provides for much faster machine commissioning.

Other significant improvements include the ability to provide servocontrol to multiple pump arrangements in a master-slave format.

This approach allows sophisticated pressure control even with several, individual servopump stages operating in one common oil volume.

Some other unique benefits of the new digital electro-hydraulic RKP Pump include: digital onboard electronics uses improved control structures to provide more dynamic and precise control of the basic pump functions, which leads to greater dynamic and consistency of machine operations than is possible with traditional analogue servopumps; advanced trouble-shooting with full access to all internal parameters during operation helps to minimise downtime and enables users to diagnose common faults via HMI or laptop interface; factory presetting of the pump makes it a "plug and play" device, which can be easily installed without time-consuming adjustments; and "one-parameter" tuning allows easy adjustment of the pressure controller, even for users without detailed knowledge.

The high-performance, flexible control system used for this new pump makes it the ideal solution for pressure- and flow-controlled hydraulic systems of any kind.

It is especially valuable for sequential machine processes, which require adaptation of the pump parameters during operation.

These benefits can be obtained not only while running it via the CANbus interface, but also when using simple analogue command signals.

The Moog RKP pump is a robust and contamination resistant design that is well known in the industrial marketplace for demanding applications.

The new digital version of the pump is available in seven pump sizes between 19 and 140cm3 per revolution with continuous pressure up to 280bar, with 350bar peak limit.

Multiple pump arrangements are also available.

"In injection moulding machines, the digital version of the RKP pump will enable machine builders to differentiate themselves from competitors by offering improved functionality, faster step response, advanced diagnostics and easy setup", said Michael Sieber, Moog's Plastics Machinery Marketing Manager for Europe.