Hydraulic systems come in all shapes and sizes. Some are designed to work within machinery and others like a Hydraulic Power Unit that you can find from https://www.hydraproducts.co.uk/Hydraulic-Power-Units/Standard-Power-Units help to power other pieces of equipment. They all have one thing in common. They use water and fluid to build up pressure in the system to then allow the hydraulics to work.
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Hydraulics are incredibly strong and a small machine can lift tonnes of weight that would seem almost impossible, all thanks to the pressure that is built up in the system. There are some common features of all hydraulics and some very interesting facts about these pieces of equipment and here are just a few of them for you to have a look through.
- All hydraulic systems have four main parts – an area that stores the fluid, a pump that moves the fluid through the unit, a valve that helps with the regulation of the pressure and a cylinder that works by converting the fluid and pressure into a force or motion.
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- Energy that is created in a hydraulic system will come as output in two ways. This could be directly as a force that is needed to work a particular part of the machinery that the hydraulic element is a part of, or it can be used as energy that will then power another piece of equipment or machinery.
- NASA used hydraulics in some of the pumps that were installed in space shuttles.
- The energy produced from hydraulics comes in three forms – heat energy, potential energy (also known as pressure) and kinetic energy. The type of energy produced will depend on what the piece of equipment the hydraulics are powering are designed to do.