Hydraulic accumulators function like compact fluid batteries. In electronics terms, they’re capacitors or energy storage units. They store fluid energy, in other words. When they work as they’re designed to, remote system energies keep heavy mechanical assemblies moving responsively. However, if a hydraulic accumulator operates inefficiently, those moving parts become unresponsive. They move, but the motion is sluggish. Clearly, especially in mobile hydraulics gear, accumulator efficiency is an important matter.
Troubleshooting Hydraulic Accumulator Losses
The problem won’t be found in the device’s material build. Remember, their seamless cylindrical housings are made from high-grade stainless steels, from titanium and carbon fibre composites, too. That’s a necessary design feature for a device that’s expected to store massive amounts of fluid pressure. Inside the cylinder, that’s where the issue is causing problems. Having realized that important fact, let’s take this opportunity to list the available types of accumulator architectures:
At any rate, it’s not a long list. With the bladder variant, one side of the
sack is filled with an inert gas. Thanks to this design feature, bladder models
are incredibly responsive, which is probably why they’re so popular.
Unfortunately, the gas filling procedure can go wrong. If the gas charge
process is poorly regulated, the gaseous pressure will embrittle the bladder’s
internal components. To avoid this and other charging headaches, the nitrogen
must be admitted to the accumulator chamber slowly.
Regarding Piston and Diaphragm Accumulator Shortcomings
Gas is the troublemaker again, at least that’s
the case with diaphragm and bladder models. If the chilled gas permeates a
low-quality flex-material within the cylindrical housing, then the stored
charge won’t be released efficiently when it’s needed. Consequently, equipment
responsiveness issues will arise. As for the piston type, even without a
flexible bladder, high-pressure pistons perform sluggishly when the fluid
stored in the piston chamber is contaminated. Purely mechanical hydraulic
accumulators are essentially fluid-sensitive devices, so they must be filtered
properly. Again, if the filter becomes clogged, all kinds of system
inefficiency issues will propagate.
To start with, a maintenance engineer needs to identify the hydraulic
accumulator type. There’s no use using a bladder-type diagnosis routine to fault-find
a piston-type model, after all. After the inner workings are identified, the
real troubleshooting process can begin. Looking at a piston model, are the
inlet filters functioning? Is that fluid uncontaminated and fully cleaned?
Likewise, with bladder models now under scrutiny, is the nitrogen gas properly
charged? And remember, if that charging procedure is incautiously conducted,
the chilled gaseous medium could embrittle the device’s internal workings.
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