Effects of flow inertia modelling and valve-plate geometry on swash-plate axial-piston pump performance

The present work aims at developing a methodology for designing a swash-plate axial-piston pump whose barrel kidneys are wider than the bridges separating the kidney ports on the plate. Besides reducing pressure ripples and avoiding cavitation for minimizing the fluid-borne noise, maximization of the pump discharge has also been considered in formulating an objective function to be minimized. A comprehensive mathematical model considering oil compressibility and inertia has been developed and implemented in MATLAB/Simulink for dynamic simulation of the pump flow. The model has been found acceptable by observing a good match between its predictions of mean discharge and delivery pressure and available experimental results. A detailed parametric study has been performed and the optimum angles for the valve-plate pre-compression and the barrel kidneys have been obtained.