In the project ACTIVAL, the IMS and its industrial partner Burckhardt-Compression developed an actively controlled valve for reciprocating piston compressors that has significantly lower pressure and flow losses compared to passive designs. This was achieved with a very high cycle number of 10^9 and low power consumption.The IMS was able to contribute to the development in particular with flow investigations, the development of a control system for soft landing at high cycle rates, electronics and sensor development, the optimisation of the power consumption and the optimisation of the actuator.The newly developed valve has the following advantages:

• The valve can be switched at any time.
• The efficiency could be increased significantly.
• The principle allows volume control of the outflowing gas.