With the increasingly stringent regulations on air quality and consequent emission limits, companies and research centers are concentrating on studying new solutions for improving efficiency and energy-saving even in off-road mobile machines. Conventional hydraulic applications are being connected to electrified power units to recover energy and improve efficiency. A typical example is a Load Sensing (LS) system suffering from metering losses where implementation of hydraulics together with electrical parts may improve considerably the global system efficiency. These new modifications and concepts at the system level can no longer be implemented only through direct testing on the field: digitalization must be adopted in order to select the right components and size properly a novel system before building any prototype.

After a brief description of the Casappa group, Casappa’s vision of the future impact of Electrification and Digitalization technology trends on machines and hydraulic components will be shown.
It will also highlight some examples of innovative activities and technologies that Casappa is developing to follow this vision, useful to develop tomorrow’s products suitable for these trends.
Finally, it will be explained how innovation at Casappa is closely linked to resources of high technical competence, both internal and external, coming from and forming part of the university environment.

The new technologies areas like digitization, electrification and automation are paving a new era in the off-road machine design and production. The usage of simulation in this sector is evolving rapidly and is taking a key role in order to manage the complexity, the development time and costs.
Deep learning, Internet of Thing, and automated robotics solutions are now being used in commercial products.  Different simulation tools have been developed to design these new generation of off-road vehicles. By testing a product in a virtual environment, engineers can speed up the design and validation process and with modeling techniques can support the choice of the optimal architectures and achieve the best product performances. In this way it is possible to reduce the number of physical prototypes necessary for validation and move many tests from the field to the computer, reducing the CO2 emission. In fact, traditional testing requires farming equipment to be used in a wide range of environments, as well as being trialed on several varieties of crops and this causes a high product development cost and carbon emissions (fuel and prototypes). The implementation of digital twin of the product and of the plant will be a key technology to implement predictive maintenance, real-time remote monitoring, product line’s assessment, improved productivity and efficiency.
Finally, the use of virtual simulation will contribute to design next generation of products that will be more innovative, efficient, and sustainable.

New market trends and always more stringent regulations are leading the OEMs of systems and vehicles (on-road and off-road) to deeply focus on various engineering aspects: performances, environmental impact, controllability, comfort and safety. These complementary targets represent a complex trade-off and/or optimization engineering problem that can be addressed with multiple approaches.
Dana’s approach is to develop and provide multi-functional and smart-integrated systems taking advantage of the combination of high-fidelity virtual tools and data analytics, managing the increasing multi-domain complexity of these problems.
A compact wheel loader driveline modelling, a bent axis unit virtual model validation methodology and a smart integrated system, the intelligent twin steering system (iTSS), are some examples for the approach.

Global emissions of greenhouse gases are now more than 50% higher than the pre-industrial era and effects of global warming are in everyone’s sight. Rightfully so, western governments are setting strict emission targets for the near future, but many industry sectors are challenged by how such targets can be met in a way that is also economically sustainable. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that compared to renewables, fuels switching, and carbon capture and storage, energy efficiency is the largest contributor to global greenhouse gas reductions towards 2050. This is where Danfoss Power Solutions technologies and solution become more relevant than ever. An illustrative example is the Danfoss Digital Displacement (DD) technology applied to 20 Ton excavators. Large excavators are responsible for 46% of total CO2 emission of construction machines, with an average system efficiency of just 30%. Danfoss is targeting a major efficiency and productivity increase by applying Digital Displacement with a multitiered approached: Pump Swap (SA1), Optimized system (SA2) and New system architecture (SA3). SA1 is already out of the laboratory and into the field with a proven 20% fuel saving and 20% productivity increase. Further fuel saving, from 30% to 50% are achievable with SA2 and SA3. Moreover, improved system efficiency lower barriers for electrification, enabling full electric construction machines, where DD can be combined with Danfoss Editron Drive in what is thought to be world’s most efficient conversion from DC (battery) power to fluid power: up to 89% overall efficiency.

“The development of fluid machinery components traditionally relies on some basic design tools (excel, paper and pencil) and sometimes on slightly more advanced ones (lumped parameters models).
The advantage of these tools is that they are based on the expertise of engineers, accumulated over the years, as well as on common sense. Therefore, they provide robust and reliable results (i.e. designs).
Remarkably, none of these methods is fully tridimensional or solves for the actual conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy when it comes to estimate the behaviour of the fluid which flows through the component.
In fact, solving for some non-linear differential equations in a volume that changes its shape and dimension over time is not straightforward and requires a large amount of computational power.
However, in these last 10 years, thanks to new advances in engineering software and computer hardware technologies, tridimensional CFD tools have greatly improved and can now be integrated successfully in a pump/motor or valve development process.

The reasons to implement a CFD-based design process are mainly of two kinds:

1) Get a tridimensional insight in your component behaviour
2) Obtain a predictive model

A tridimensional predictive model enables the designer to
-Predict performance
-Predict leakage and losses
-Compare and select designs (prototyping)
-Study the effects of aeration and cavitation

This presentation will show a few examples of how the above mentioned points can help design more efficient and robust fluid power components.”

Parker Hannifin is the global leader in motion control systems. And the control of motion is undoubtedly the main purpose of Fluid Power. Therefore, the future of Parker is intertwined with the future of Fluid Power: driven by new technologies, trends and solutions for controlling the actuation of machines. One important aspect is that Parker, by nature a customer and market driven company, is always looking first at what are the needs of the different markets served: from industrial plants to mobile vehicles, and aerospace applications. Parker sees Fluid Power keeping the same solid roots and developing more and more in its multidisciplinary feature; embracing new technologies and components which traditionally were not considered as part of Fluid Power. This because, when applied to hydraulics, these components become very specific and unique, especially when they are part of integrated solutions. The presentation from Parker will provide a brief overview of market and technology trends which should be the drivers for the next developments in Fluid power: from the application of electrical machines to the focus on connected products and to the potential integration of new technologies based on intelligent materials.