Pneumatic servo valve for air muscle

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Hello Everyone, This is a pneumatic servo valve I designed originally to be able to fully control an air muscle. This can be used for a pneumatic powered robot, an exosqueletton, or whatever you have using compressed air. It allows proportional control of two ports (in and out) with only one hobby servo motor. Which means you can get any configuration of the two ports independantly: Closed/Closed Open/Closed Closed/Open.... but also any position in between, so it can be partially opened on all the range so you can control the power! So basically, with this system, you can fully control an air muscle or an air cylinder with only one servo, so just one output of your microcontroller. This works with a camshaft pressing on two pistons. The camshaft is directly mounted on the servo shaft and the pistons are in contact with the cam through little bearings. You will need to have a silicon tube (8 mm outside diameter) and insert them all the way into the casing. The pistons will press on the silicon tubes, thus closing or opening the flow of air. The silicon tube needs then to be connected to some ptfe tube, you can just slide the ptfe tube inside the silicon tube (at least 1cm inside the casing). I tested it at 8 bar of air pressure and it was working fine, the tubes never came off. This thing allows to get a somewhat proportional control of air flow, to lock the muscle into a specific position or use a specific amount of force. I wasn't able to find something similar available commercially at a reasonable price, hence my attempt at designing one. Almost all commercially available valves like the cheap AirTac ones are only ON/OFF devices, there is not way to easily control the flow. In addition, this thing is rather compact so it can be easily integrated into any project you may have. I've tested mine during a few hours and it worked very well, feel free to use it and share whatever you created using it! Hope it will be useful to someone!

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