Special section on digital fluid power

Nowadays, Digital Fluid Power is an established field in the fluid power community. Several research groups in Europe, the United States and Asia work on some of its topics, in cooperation with industry or independently. The success of digital electronics was and is a strong motivation to try digital concepts in fluid power. Despite the analogies between electrical and fluid power systems, there are major differences in some fundamental physical properties of the two media—electric charge and hydraulic fluids—and how they behave in components like transmission lines, valves, pumps and motors, and also in the technical performance characteristics of main components. These differences prevent a simple transfer of digital electronic concepts to fluid power and offer numerous interesting and challenging research problems in many respects, from concept development over modeling and simulation to component development and control. In a series of annual digital fluid power workshops from 2008 onward, researchers from science and industry present new results, discuss methods of successful industrial realization and can inspect experimental prototypes of digital fluid solutions in the lab of the organizing institution. In this special issue, 3 out of 15 papers from the Seventh Digital Fluid Power Workshop, which took place in Linz, Austria, 26–27 February 2015, are presented in an extended version. All these papers have been peer reviewed. They give an insight into some of the actual research topics and, hopefully, encourage research groups not yet actively involved in digital fluid power to join this field. Only with innovative contributions from a large number of research groups, digital fluid power can be sufficiently explored and developed to become broadly successful and produce useful practical applications.