How to Correctly Identify Whether a Hydraulic Valve Is a 2-Way 2-Position Solenoid Valve

A hydraulic valve is an important control component in a hydraulic system. According to its function, a hydraulic valve can be divided into flow valves, such as throttle valves, speed control valves, and flow-divider/collector valves; pressure valves, such as relief valves, pressure reducing valves, sequence valves, and unloading valves; and directional valves, such as solenoid directional valves, manual directional valves, check valves, pilot-operated check valves, and water-use 2-way 2-position solenoid valves. Today we will only talk about directional control valves.

A directional control valve, that is, a directional valve, serves in a hydraulic system to block and guide the oil to enter and exit the passages according to a specified flow direction; the high-pressure 2-way 2-position solenoid valve controls the flow direction of the oil in the oil circuit. There are two important concepts in a directional valve: position and way. Position refers to how many working positions the valve core of the directional valve has, represented by squares in the schematic diagram; way refers to how many oil inlet and outlet ports there are, represented by arrows in the schematic diagram.

Positions and ways in a hydraulic directional valve — how to identify how many positions and ways?

So how do you identify how many positions and ways a hydraulic valve has? The more common types in hydraulic directional valves are 2-position (left position, right position) and 3-position (left, right, middle), with the oil flow direction being different at each working position; 'ways' actually refers to how many oil pipes the directional valve is connected to externally, the common ones being 2-way, 3-way, 4-way, and 5-way. How many squares there are represents how many positions the valve has, and how many oil ports there are represents how many ways the valve has; together they are called an N-position M-way valve, such as a 2-position 2-way valve or a 3-position 4-way valve.

In the schematic diagram, we can look at how many 'squares' separated by vertical lines there are in the symbol — the number of squares is the number of positions; then look at how many vertical lines intersecting the border of a given 'square' there are — the number is the number of ways. The arrows represent passages (liquid flow direction): one arrow represents two ways, i.e., oil inlet and oil outlet, and two arrows represent four ways; the intersection of the ┴ and ┬ symbols with the box indicates that the passage is blocked by the valve core. If a box in the figure has two arrows and one ┬, that indicates five ways, with one way blocked.