This paper is concerned with effective operating method of pneumatic on-off valves for improving position control accuracy, valve life-time and position settling time using modified pulse width modulation with dead-zone(MDPWM). The pneumatic system using on-off valves studied in this paper has advantage of simple construction and low cost compared with a system with servo-valves. The performance of the proposed control method is investigated experimentally for the position control of a pneumatic cylinder using on-off valves. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm for valve operation can be used to obtain fast and accurate position control compared to the conventional DPWM algorithm. It is also shown that the use of the proposed MDPWM algorithm for the position control drastically reduces the number of valve switching.
