Application
The choice of liquid or gas as the fluid power medium is governed by the application requirements:
- Cost: pneumatics are considerably less expensive to build and operate. For one, air is used as the compressed medium, so there is no need to provide means to drain or recover fluid. With increasing working pressures, Hydraulics require larger parts than pneumatics.
- Precision: Unlike liquids, gases change volume significantly when pressurized making it difficult to achieve precision.
- Safety: Compressed gases tend to expand at high velocities when decompressed, thus pneumatics are typically limited in utilities with a working pressure up to around 100 psi (7 bar).
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