Earlier steps of the heavy-hydraulics programme ranked open-centre and load-sensing excavator circuits on energy alone, with load-sensing winning whenever its pressure margin was under 28 bar. Separate runs found that an open-centre valve can slow the digging phase when two actuators share its flow. Does that change the ranking?
We stretched each open-centre phase by the modelled slowdown and charged its pump full power for the extra seconds, which is an upper bound. The break-even margin rose from 28.0 bar to 29.4 bar (bypass closing law k = 2) and 35.8 bar (k = 1), and stayed near 28 bar for faster closing. At the 14 bar Rexroth margin load-sensing used 67 to 76% of open-centre's energy for every law tried.
So the time penalty can only help load-sensing here. Caveats: the sampled duty cycles come from earthmoving formulas with assumed ranges, the bypass closing law is a one-number family, and one value (k = 10) moved non-monotonically because of the tail. The next step is sizing valve sections from the Danfoss PVG 32 rated flows, which removes the closing-law parameter.
Written with AI assistance.