Direct drive servovalves are mostly restricted to low flow rate and low bandwidth applications due to the considerable flow forces.Current studies mainly focus on enhancing the driving force,which in turn is limited to the development of the magnetic material.Aiming at reducing the flow forces,a novel rotary direct drive servovalve(RDDV)is introduced in this paper.This RDDV servovalve is designed in a rotating structure and its axially symmetric spool rotates within a certain angle range in the valve chamber.The servovalve orifices are formed by the matching between the square wave shaped land on the spool and the rectangular ports on the sleeve.In order to study the RDDV servovalve performance,flow rate model and mechanical model are established,wherein flow rates and flow induced torques at different spool rotation angles or spool radiuses are obtained.The model analysis shows that the driving torque can be alleviated due to the proposed valve structure.Computational fluid dynamics(CFD)analysis using ANSYS/FLUENT is applied to evaluate and validate the theoretical analysis.In addition,experiments on the flow rate and the mechanical characteristic of the RDDV servovalve are carried out.Both simulation and experimental results conform to the results of the theoretical model analysis,which proves that this novel and innovative structure for direct drive servovalves can reduce the flow force on the spool and improve valve frequency response characteristics.This research proposes a novel rotary direct drive servovalve,which can reduce the flow forces effectively.
Scanning ion conductance microscopy(SICM) is an emerging non-destructive surface topography characterization apparatus with nanoscale resolution. However, the low regulating frequency of probe in most existing modulated current based SICM systems increases the system noise, and has difficulty in imaging sample surface with steep height changes. In order to enable SICM to have the capability of imaging surfaces with steep height changes, a novel probe that can be used in the modulated current based hopping mode is designed. The design relies on two piezoelectric ceramics with different travels to separate position adjustment and probe frequency regulation in the Z direction. To further improve the resonant frequency of the probe, the material and the key dimensions for each component of the probe are optimized based on the multi-objective optimization method and the finite element analysis. The optimal design has a resonant frequency of above 10 kHz. To validate the rationality of the designed probe, microstructured grating samples are imaged using the homebuilt modulated current based SICM system. The experimental results indicate that the designed high frequency probe can effectively reduce the spike noise by 26% in the average number of spike noise. The proposed design provides a feasible solution for improving the imaging quality of the existing SICM systems which normally use ordinary probes with relatively low regulating frequency.
