Pneumatic actuators are used in a wide variety of industrial applications. The life cycle costs (LCC) of the drives become more and more important in investment decisions as the acquisition costs do not necessarily reflect the drives’ economic efficiency. This thesis describes the examination of the entire life cycle of pneumatic drives based on economic and ecological impact factors. The LCC of the actuators are estimated based on typical load cycles and compared to electromechanical linear drives designed for comparable applications. An assessment of the efficiency potential of the pneumatic drives is executed by implementing different exergy saving measures with low installation effort and their experimental investigation. Nowadays, the operation of the whole pneumatic system at a lower system pressure gathers growing attention to reduce thermodynamic losses in the compressor which, on the downside, requires the implementation of larger drives to gain the same output force and load stiffness. Some applications still afford small drives with high force. To avoid the implementation costs of an additional high-pressure system, it is possible to install pneumatically driven pressure boosters that enable local increase of the pressure near the drives. The thesis presents the development of a novel pressure booster concept based on pneumatic radial piston units with inner support. It is evaluated in a simulation study and a functional model is designed and manufactured. The functional model is examined in experiments and different optimisations are implemented. As a conclusion, the impact of low-pressure pneumatic systems includingpneumatic boosters on the overall efficiency and the life cycle costs of the drives is estimated.weiterlesen