FLEXOMAT

<p>The advantages of high efficiency, reliability, flexibility and high power to weight ratio make axial piston pumps popular for use in a wide variety of applications like construction and agricultural machinery, off road vehicles and aerospace applications. However, a major drawback which limits their extensive use in other commercial applications is noise. One of the important components in axial piston machines is the valve plate, which influences the transition of the suction and delivery flows into and out of the displacement chamber. Appropriate design of the valve plate can play a significant role in influencing the rate of compression and expansion in the displacement chamber, and hence contribute towards the abatement of noise in axial piston machines. Furthermore, the relief grooves in valve plates makes them relatively less sensitive to operating conditions for the operation of the pump. The high sensitivity of the valve plate design towards the pressure build up in the displacement chamber and towards the noise sources are big motivation factors towards rigorously exploring the design space to find suitable designs to meet the objective of noise reduction. This motivates the development of an advanced computational tool, colloquially called 'MiNoS', where a powerful optimization algorithm has been combined together with a novel parametrization scheme for valve plate design and a 1D simulation model of swash plate type axial piston machines to find optimized designs which can contribute towards noise reduction in swash plate type axial piston machines. Furthermore, incorporation of the appropriate constraint also helps in avoiding designs susceptible to the onset of cavitation in the displacement chamber. A case study performed using the developed computational tool has been shown later in this work.</p>