Most vendors have ongoing efforts to improve reliability of the pneumatic components they offer, with the goal of providing long, trouble-free service to users. So while the reliability standards discussed above show promise for the future, efforts are underway now to improve the pneumatics you can specify today. Here are some of the programs we’ve seen that impress us; we recognize that many other suppliers have similar programs.
Festo: Pneumatics offer reliability backed by long-term testing. This guarantees millions of operating cycles for valves and valve terminals, and thousands of kilometers of running distance, for example, with standard cylinders. Before the products of any series leave the factory, they must pass long-term functional and endurance tests, both during the development phase and in all phases of the product life cycle.
Festo testing results include data on their “Millionaires’ Club,” with, for example, valves that have completed over 1,000 million switching cycles or cylinders that have covered a running distance of over 45,000 km.
In endurance testing, daily functional checks are carried out by acoustic, visual, and tactile means. Leakage rates, characteristic pressure values, switching times, guide backlash, and minimum operating pressure are checked before and after the test and at cyclical intervals during the test. Testing is stopped as soon as either a total failure has taken place or certain limits for defined characteristic values are exceeded, even though the product is fundamentally still capable of operating (tolerance failure).
Festo has been carrying out long-term testing for over 30 years. “We currently have around 1,500 items on test at the same time. We store the resulting data on our service-life database, which contains detailed information on over 20,000 test items.”
: Design World :
