How do Hydraulic Car Lifts Function?

Have you ever seen stock car racing? If yes, then you are aware of hydraulic car lifts. They were built to do something strong and are very much easy to use. It is a compressed car lift and needs to be slided below your car before it lifts the car. If you are an owner of a professional garage then this hydraulic car lift will do great in keeping your vehicles maintained.

The mechanism of this device is very interesting because of its technology which goes back to the Hellenic Greece era. The technique of using water to create pressure in the mechanical system was what the Hellenic Greece applied for the first time. The modern technology has improved a lot to become more compact and advanced. It has become extremely easy to harness the technology as of today.

The hydraulic car lifts can raise weights of 5 tons without much problem and therefore is a gem of a machine. Whether you want to change a tyre or oil of a car, these machines will always be at your service.

Going into the details:

Let's discuss in details all about the hydraulic car lifts, so that its mechanism is clear to you:

How does a Hydraulic Car Lift Work?

A hydraulic car lift works by a simple mechanism.It transmits force by an incompressible fluid. Have you seen children playing with water guns? This hydraulic lift works by a simple mechanism found in water guns. What happens within a water gun is that, while you pull the trigger you actually exert a lot of force against the water and the water shots out of the nozzle. Hydraulic car lifts use very simple mechanism and can be easily understood without much problem.

How is it compared with the toy water gun?

The makers of hydraulic car lifts applied the mechanism of toy water gun in a much more advanced manner. The hydraulic car lift start working when the force that is applied to it gets transmitted by the hydraulic fluid to the other points within the system. The best part of the mechanism is that the force gets multiplied when the fluid travels from one end to the other within the machine. Hence, just by applying little bit of pressure, the machine can lift huge amount of weight.

So, we can see that by applying such a simple mechanism of toy water gun, this machine can actually lift huge cars.

How does the Air Bubble Create Problem?

Oil or water, whichever be used in the system of a hydraulic lift, is called incompressible fluid. Now what does this incompressible fluid mean? It means that the fluid density always remains same regardless of whatever amount of pressure is applied to it.

Air gets easily compressed and does not evenly distribute the force. Due to this, when a hydraulic system develops an air bubble within it, the total system comes to a halt and eventually gets damaged. What happens is, rather than distributing the force throughout the oil, the air bubble eats up most of the force. The end result is that the other piston stops working and the car doesn't get lifted up from the ground.

Does the Hydraulic lift assure an even lift all the time?

All the hydraulic lifts with power unit of AC or DC have a built in the hydraulic flow divider so that the lift is same every time.

Summing

I hope I have been successful in making you understand what a hydraulic car lift is and how does it actually works. In case of any doubts please contact us and clarify. Hydraulic car lifts are are good for your home as well as workstation garage.

Drew Graham is a Automotive mechanical Engineer and has more than 10 years of experience in automotive industry. He loves to pen down his knowledge through many blogs. To solve your query contact us through his facebook and Twitter network.