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A small Fort Wayne company is starting to familiarize the hydraulics world with some concepts it patented this year that could revolutionize the industry. The head of DigitalHydraulic LLC who came up with its technological breakthrough, Elton Bishop, presented a paper on it at the Scandinavian International Conference on Fluid Power in Sweden this summer.
His “Digital Hydraulic Transformer- Approaching Theoretical Perfection in Hydraulic Drive Efficiency,” was well enough received to get him invited to another important industry conference in November in Austria.
“If you’re the leader in the field you have to represent; you have to show up and claim your territory,” Bishop said. “At this last conference I basically set a new bar for efficiency; this isn’t coming along and playing by somebody else’s rules.
“I came in and introduced this technology, and it’s the most efficient technology anyone I had ever had contact with had ever seen.
“I have to be constantly pushing the technology and have to show that I’m at the forefront. It’s a lot of responsibility, but it’s also something I enjoy.”
Bishop invented a digital hydraulic transformer in 2001 following three years of extensive research. Ordinary hydraulic equipment used for a lot of very heavy work wastes about 65 percent of the energy it consumes, on average, and the transformer is much more efficient.
In a demonstration, a test-phase DHT prototype built in 2007 required 71 percent less energy to perform a task than conventional, valve-controlled hydraulic equipment.
Conventional hydraulic equipment could be retrofitted with the system Bishop has developed, and he is working toward having a version next year that could be available for testing in the field. A number of companies that use hydraulic equipment have expressed interest in the testing, he said.
The DHT got a lot of attention from the world’s top experts in fluid power technology at SICFP ’09 in Sweden, said Bishop, whose company is a client at the Northeast Indiana Innovation Center.
“I made a lot of contacts at the conference. The world’s biggest hydraulics companies were there and the main research throughout the whole world was there,” he said.
“It’s surreal. I’m on a first-name basis with the top people in the world with hydraulics … and there were moments when it seemed right then and there that we were shaping the future of hydraulics.”
Within the next two years DigitalHydraulic plans to develop a version of the DHT that can be produced efficiently and will outsource its production in northeast Indiana, he said.
The company will set up regional centers to retrofit hydraulic equipment, including mining and construction equipment that consumes millions of dollars worth of oil every year.
“Some people are interested in pursuing the technology. Some people are interested in developing the technology. And some people are interested in funding the technology,” Bishop said.
With the business arrangements that eventually could come out of the conference, “it definitely was a good first experience,” he said in October. “I’m looking for at least as good a response at the upcoming conference.”
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