The high-pressure cylinder runs its components at 10,000 psi all day long. The high-pressure tool industry does away with describing their cylinders by their bore size or pressure capacity and jumps right into describing them in tons. The high-pressure tool industry’s favorite cylinder design is the ram. A ram uses a rod with no piston, making its construction quite simple. So long as the fluid is sealed around that rod, pumping in oil from any location will force the rod to extend, albeit very slowly. The tradeoff with high-pressure cylinders is speed. An actuator moving quickly at extreme pressure is a recipe for seal failure through extrusion, which is why these tools often move slowly.
The higher the pressure you run in a hydraulic actuator, the more force it can offer, so long as it’s constructed to handle that pressure. As a result, the hydraulic tools are fairly compact and portable. In fact, the cylinders and pumping system used to lift an entire house will fit into the back of a pickup. These single-acting rams are placed at structurally critical locations under the foundation of a house to either work on its foundation or move the entire structure to a new location.
Of course, not all high-pressure cylinders are used in the tooling industry. For example, I recently worked on a cylinder application for an aerospace customer who needed a hydraulic actuator capable of withstanding more than 20,000 psi of static, load-induced pressure. Used for testing, the cylinder positions a test fixture and then is subjected to high force loads, which are transferred to the cylinder.
The application of high-pressure cylinders