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What Are Pneumatic Circuit Symbols & What Are They Used For?

Have you ever tried to complete any kind of sophisticated technical project without knowing what the end result was going to look like? It was probably unbelievably difficult since you had no way to tell whether or not you were building it the right way.

In fact, there’s a good chance that you had to stop and perform a series of tests along the way just to see which parts were malfunctioning. It probably took a great deal of trial and error before you had everything working just right.

If you’re like most people, then this doesn’t sound like a very pleasant experience at all. Fortunately, there’s a much better way to handle this if you plan on working with compressed air circuitry to optimize flow control.

Pneumatic circuit symbols provide a road map that you can follow to properly wire each piece of compressed-air driven system. Anyone who can read electrical schematics or traditional blueprints may be able to figure out what each of these standardized symbols means without any other training. The same goes for those who work in the natural gas or extraction industries.

We asked the experts at SMC Pneumatics to provide a rundown of the more common ones so that anyone can employ them the next time they work on laying out a big project. It might help to start with the circular symbol group, which are among the most commonly used. You’ll probably run into these regardless of what kind of project you happen to be working on.

Rounded Pneumatic Circuit Symbols

Several similar-looking symbols are used in circuit diagrams to depict motors and pumps. If you see a rounded object with an open wedge in the side, then you’ve come across a standard air pump based on a compressor. You more than likely have this kind of part in your collection, though SMC has a collection of fittings just in case you don’t have the right adapter on hand to get everything hooked up correctly.

Should you find that the wedge is colored in, you can safely assume that the pump in question is hydraulic. Fortunately, you’ll seldom come across this in modern circuits because compressed air-driven equipment has come so far in recent years that you can accomplish almost any kind of job with it.

When the wedges are faced in the other direction, they’re telling you to put in a motor. Those that have attached wires are illustrating that you’ll need a roller actuated valve. You might also find a pump attached to a plain circle with an upper case letter M in it. This simply means you need an electric motor to power your pump.

Valves themselves actually can be depicted by a number of individual symbols. Fortunately, these are easily distinguished once you have a little practice with them.

Spring actuated valves are normally indicated by a pair of peaks, which makes them extremely easy to spot in any diagram. Some people might think that they look like a single bolt of electricity or a set of mountaintops.

You may also find a set of perpendicular lines, which suggest that you should connect a manually actuated valve to the air circuit that you’re working with. A knob on top of them indicates that it’s controlled by a lever while another diagonal line tells a seasoned technician to install a solenoid to keep everything moving smoothly.

Eventually, you might start to see a series of boxes that incorporate all of these designs. These more sophisticated diagrams can encode any of the following parts:

• Single-acting cylinder

• Double-acting cylinder

• Cylinder with spring return

• Cylinder with spring-loaded advance

• Cylinder ports

• Pressure ports

• Return or tank ports

Normally, at the end of the line, you’ll see some oblong pneumatic circuit symbols, which are indicative of receiving tanks or release valves. While following these diagrams might be a bit of a challenge at first, you may find that it gets easier much more quickly than you may have thought possible.

Following Along With Pneumatic Circuit Symbols

More than likely, you’ll come across countless other symbols. Some of the more common ones that you’re going to see in the average schematic diagram include any of the following:

• Accumulators

• Air dryers

• Exhaust lines

• Filters

• Control lines

• Lubricators

• Flow regulators

• Check valves

• Coolers

• Pressure regulators

The direction of flow is a special type of indicator that shows you which way air will flow through a circuit. Unlike an electrical circuit, pneumatic ones could theoretically pass in either direction. As a result, you’ll need to pay close attention to this arrow whenever you find it in a design.

Even though this probably does seem a good bit different from the way that things are done in an electrical circuit diagram, things aren’t all that unusual. If you can follow the lines indicating which pieces are attached to which, then you’ll be able to turn that paper diagram into an efficient real-world project in no time.

Those who might have worked with Unicode symbols may not have seen pneumatic circuit images in the past, but that doesn’t mean many of the miscellaneous technical ones that specification includes are indeed very similar. They also share some things in common with special types of mathematical symbols that are used on the pages of nearly every college textbook.

Whether you have a background in discrete mathematics or manufacturing technology, you should find that it’s quite easy to get used to the concept of pneumatic circuit symbols once you’ve done the bare minimum of experimentation with them.

In fact, this is the idea. Since technical drawings are so easy to follow along with, they can help any sort of company benefit from the use of compressed air-driven equipment.

Building A Real Compressed Air Circuit From A Schematic Diagram With SMC Pneumatics’ Help

No matter what kind of symbols are used in the schematic you’re following along with, they won’t mean much if you don’t have the real components to finish your project. Finding the equipment you need to get the job done shouldn’t have to be difficult. However, plenty of technicians have found midway through the assembly process that they didn’t have a particular part and therefore have to hold everything up.
You won’t need to worry about the possibility of this scenario when you work with SMC Pneumatics to get the right parts for your latest project. Contact us online today and tell one of our knowledgeable representatives about what kind of equipment the plans need. They’ll be able to get you the right kind of gear at a price that you can afford.

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