Hydraulic Cylinder Designs and Construction Types
Welded Cap
Welded cap hydraulic cylinders offer an economical solution to projects that demand high-pressure, robust, and compact hydraulic actuators. Welded cap cylinders typically employ removable heads (tapped barrel, threaded barrel, flanged barrel) to permit piston seal and bearing service.
Welded cap cylinders, especially long ones, cannot be repaired and inspected as easily as removable cap cylinders and are therefore appropriate where re-buildability is not a priority. Hydraulic cylinders can also be built with both welded caps and welded heads. This construction is the least serviceable of all cylinder designs and is appropriate for highly engineered, application-specific cylinders optimized for weight, strength, and size.
Tie-Rod Cylinders
Tie-rod cylinders use four or more high-strength tie-rods to secure their caps, heads, and barrels together. The cylinder construction is extremely popular in indoor, stationary industrial applications. Most commercially available tie-rod cylinders conform to NFPA or ISO mounting standards, which permits easy interchange of cylinders from dozens of manufacturers. Pre-engineered tie-rod cylinders are versatile, easily specified and purchased, field serviceable, economical, and readily available with short lead times.
Tie-rod cylinders are an excellent choice for many low and medium-pressure industrial applications, but are less appropriate than other designs when long strokes, high-pressures, large cycle counts, submerged service, high reliability, compact designs, shock and overload exposure, severe environments, or other challenging requirements apply.
Tapped Barrel
Tapped barrel cylinders are both robust and cost effective. The design is suitable for medium and high pressure hydraulic cylinders of nearly all bores and strokes, is serviceable and rebuildable, and can accommodate heavy-duty, submerged, and high-cycle applications. Although accuracy and care in manufacturing and quality control are required, tapped barrel cylinder constructions offer exceptional design flexibility, ruggedness, and value for civil infrastructure, marine, offshore, industrial, test, entertainment, and other industries.
Threaded Barrel
Threaded barrel hydraulic cylinders excel where repairable and compact high-pressure actuators are required. They can be designed with either internally or externally threaded barrels and be manufactured of nearly any alloy to suit unique application demands. Threaded barrel designs are often employed in small bore (< 8 in) hydraulic cylinders, but the construction can be extended to larger cylinders with appropriate engineering and care. Being compact and capable of high, even extreme, pressures – threaded barrel hydraulic cylinders are often ideal for mining, marine, military, and other demanding mobile applications.
Flanged Barrel
Flanged barrel hydraulic cylinders employ welded flanges to which their caps and heads are mechanically fastened. This construction makes efficient use of material and permits exceptionally rugged designs, high factors of safety, and reasonable cylinder weights. This fully serviceable and rebuildable design is compatible with all cylinder bores, strokes, and operating pressures.
Welded flanges of various designs are available, including butt-weld configurations that permit radiographic testing and other configurations where RT NDT is not explicitly required.
Flanged barrel cylinders serve civil infrastructure, offshore, marine, mining, test, and other heavy industries characterized by exceptional service-life demands, large cycle counts, high operating pressures, and shock/overload exposure.
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