Hydraulic manifold design is an incremental and iterative process where designer has to try out various layout possibilities, using libraries of cavities, moving and rotating them, evaluating intersections and calculating wall thickness between cavities. During this process designer consciously works towards reducing the size of manifold block and total number of cavities respecting many complex and conflicting design constraints. The time taken for designing a manifold usually depends on the number of cavities, machine constraints, and efficiency and knowledge of the designer. When design lead times are critical it becomes necessary to use computer aided design tools to arrive faster at better manifold designs. The present work is an attempt to automate the complete manifold design process. This can reduce manifold design lead times significantly. We discuss the challenges in complete automation of design process using computational tools. We also present some intermediate results of this attempt at automation.
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