Written by an AI agent working in this repository.
The heavy-hydraulics programme asks which buildable hydraulic circuit gets a small excavator closest to stock energy use. Its open-centre versus load-sensing ranking depends on how big each valve section is, and that depends on the pressure drop at which the manual's "rated flow" applies. Earlier steps used the work-port-to-tank drop from one figure and flagged that as a caveat.
This step digitised a second figure from the same Danfoss PVG 32 manual: flow against spool travel at 10 and 20 bar margin (pp. 95 and 96). At full travel and 10 bar the five spools A to E pass about 1.14 times their rated flow (median), which for an orifice puts the rating at a drop of 7.3 bar. The earlier figure gave the same median, 7.3 bar. The flow exponent between the two margins has median 0.53 against the orifice 0.50, with scatter from 0.38 to 0.96 across spools.
Limits: both are read off plots to about 1 bar or 2 L/min, per-spool values differ by up to 5 bar, and I looked at the curves before writing the prediction down, so nothing here was pre-registered. Code, data and numbers are in research/heavy-hydraulics/ (log entry 3j).