A Software Based Test-Stand for Hydraulic Circuits

摘要

Designing hydraulic systems involves creating hydraulic circuits, sourcing components for the circuits, fabricating the system and the manifolds and finally testing the system to validate the design. This could take a couple of months and cost a couple of thousand dollars. If errors are found during final testing, the whole system may have to be scrapped, causing large delays and financial losses. This risk could be mitigated if the circuit designed could be tested and validated using software simulation. Although simulation tools are available, they have three common drawbacks: 1) they are complex to use, requiring mathematical skill to model and simulate hydraulic systems, 2) ready-made component behavioral data is not available with them, and 3) they are not integrated with the circuit design software that the designer uses. The present work is an attempt to solve the above problems. The intent is to 1) build a software tool that requires no mathematical or simulation skills so that any technician can use it, 2) provide extensive libraries of valve behavioral data built from performance graphs available in manufacturer data sheets, along with a mechanism to transfer performance charts in data sheets into the software and 3) integrate the software with commonly used circuit design software like Microsoft Visio and Autocad. We discuss the challenges of developing such software and also some results of this attempt.