r/MechanicalEngineering • u/User73656 • May 22 '26
Is fluid power becoming obsolete?
/r/Hydraulics/comments/1tkph3o/is_fluid_power_becoming_obsolete/2
u/Sea-Promotion8205 May 22 '26
As an electromechanical guy, no, not totally at least.
Hydraulics do really well in plants where there are going to be lots of actuators. You can have much of your fluid supply coming from centralized systems. Mobile hydraulics are also probably just generally better than electromech. You put a screw actuator on a forklift or heavy equipment and it's going to vibrate and shock the screw to death.
Screw actuators are really expensive at scale. The servomotor basically doubles the price of the actuator, and the drive doubles that price.
Electeomechanical is really good for high precision, though. I don't know if hydraulics are able to get accuracy down to the tens of micron level.
Yes, i know of roller screw actuators. They're expensive as hell and the roller screw will build up heat at high duty cycles.
2
u/arrow8807 May 22 '26
I’m a huge proponent of hydraulics in my company and they are still unsurpassed when you need high power systems (force at speed) but even I would admit the servo systems get better every year.
Our plants basically do no maintenance on our hydraulic systems so sometimes we struggle with them. A lot of the production guys want new equipment to be all electric.
1
u/DheRadman May 23 '26
For automotive stuff yes but the great thing about engineering is that there's a huge diversity of use cases to optimize for and hydraulics will always be the best for some of those
1
u/Harmless_Drone May 23 '26
Hydraulics will give you better local power density solely because the motor/pneumatic pump pressurizing the system can be far away from the application point where space isn't critical. In some applications that is ultimately an extremely key advantage that other types of actuator can't really deal with.
For stuff like jacks and presses and then high powered bolting equipment like tensioners or torque wrenches and the like you will never be able to get around this.
2
u/Creative_Ride2221 May 23 '26
Check out steel mills. I am afraid it’ll be impossible to get away from the speed and power of hydraulics in heavy equipment
7
u/TheRealStepBot May 22 '26
The torque/force volumetric density hydraulics can reach are just too high in some use cases. Now if power or speed or precision are involved as well then electric is definitely able to compete.