Price Engineering Unveils New Hydraulic Reservoir
By Katherine Michalets – Freeman Staff
June 21, 2016
HARTLAND – In an era when saving costs is mightily important for companies, reducing how much oil is carried by a vehicle or a piece of machinery, as well as making the equipment lighter, goes a long way to realizing those savings. That’s why Price Engineering in Hartland took an existing design for a hydraulic reservoir system created by Eaton and made it smaller, lighter and customizable.
The new Cyclone Hydraulic Reservoirs will be unveiled during the Fluid Power Technology Conference held at the Milwaukee School of Engineering starting today.
The Cyclone Hydraulic Reservoirs were created by Price Engineering and Solar Plastics of Delano, Minn. The new hydraulic reservoirs are 10 to 20 times smaller than the traditional system so they require less fluid volume, reduce weight, diminish air and occupy a smaller space.
Hydraulic reservoirs are used in various items, from machine tools to garbage trucks.
“They can be sized smaller because they dissipate air more rapidly. The technology removes suspended air from the hydraulic fluid with cyclonic action,” Terry Glidden, managing director at Price Engineering, said in a statement. “The strong rational movement within the Cyclone Reservoir creates centrifugal forces which combine, and push, air bubbles to the center of the reservoir, and eventually, out the reservoir via what we call a breather cap.”
The redesign by Price Engineering has been sold as a steel product for the past several years, but now the company has created a nylon Cyclone that is ready for mass production and easier to customize for individual customer needs.
“With the dramatic cost savings these reservoirs are already proving to provide, I think it is safe to say they will one day become the industry norm,” Glidden said in the release. “It is an extremely exciting development for our industry. One that has been many years in the making,”
Another benefit of having the smaller oil reserve is that should there be a leak, it’s possible that less oil will escape, Glidden said. With oil weighing about 8 pounds per gallon, Glidden said having less oil carried by a piece of equipment or machinery means there will be more space for the payload.