Abstract
Water is environmentally friendly, nonflammable, inexpensive, clean, readily available, and easily disposable. As concerns for environmental compatibility, safety and hygienic requirements, hydraulic systems using raw water as pressure medium become more and more attractive. With the continual introduction of new materials and advanced manufacturing processes, hydraulic systems to operate with water have become practical. The history of pressure medium in hydraulic systems will be briefly reviewed, the advantages with water hydraulics are summarized and the main differences in physicochemical properties of water and oil are presented at first in this paper. Based on authors' research on seawater hydraulics, the main design challenges for developing water hydraulic components are analyzed. A new seawater hydraulic pump with better filling characteristics and a simulating test apparatus for testing the critical matching pairs in a seawater hydraulic pump (motor) developed at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, P. R. China, are introduced. An overview of the bright future for water hydraulics is indicated in this paper.
