Description: Hydraulic actuation is used wherever high forces are needed in compact packages, including heavy offroad machinery, industrial equipment and aircraft. But this multi-billion dollar industry has a guilty secret – despite over a century of incremental improvement, today’s hydraulic systems are still based on legacy analog architectures, wasting as much as 70% of the energy used to power them… causing millions of tonnes of needless CO2 emissions per year. Enter Digital Displacement®, a reboot of hydraulics for the 21st century: a radical shift in concept from analog mechanisms to inherently digital, computer-controlled mechatronic devices and systems. Now we can dramatically reduce both energy losses and lifecycle costs, and accelerate automation.
Hear the story from a pioneer who grew it from handmade prototypes at a University lab to deployed products from major manufacturers, spanning heavy vehicles, wind turbines and heavy-lift drones.
Speaker: Dr Niall Caldwell is an inventor, innovator and business leader. He is a passionate advocate of engineering innovation, and developing the teams of people behind it. Niall gained his BEng Hons (1995) and Phd (2007) from University of Edinburgh. He joined Artemis Intelligent Power Ltd in 1999, developing the first Digital Displacement pump/motor and vehicle applications. From 2009 he led the System Simulation team, and following acquisition by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries served as Managing Director from 2013. In 2015 the team was awarded the MacRobert Medal from the RAE. He co-founded Flowcopter in 2019 to develop drone applications, as a “spinout of a spinout”. Following acquisition by Danfoss Power Solution in 2021 he became Senior Director of R&D for the Digital Displacement business until 2024. He now serves on the board of Flowcopter, advising on strategy and technology. He is an inventor of over 500 patent cases.