Experimental Study on Energy Efficiency of Pneumatic Booster Valves with Energy Recovery

Pneumatic systems are widely used in facilities such as automobile production lines. Recently, many factories have reduced supply pressure in such systems to reduce energy consumption. Instead, pneumatic booster valves are applied to increase pressure where high pressure is still necessary. However, pneumatic booster valves consume some energy by exhausting to the atmosphere the compressed air that is used to drive the boost process. For this reason, we propose a pneumatic booster valve with energy recovery, which recovers the energy by reusing the previously exhausted compressed air. Furthermore, numerical simulation analysis on this new-type pneumatic booster valve is ongoing. Thus, in this study, we experimentally analyze a pneumatic booster valve with energy recovery.