Modeling of Hydraulic Hose Paths

Hydraulic hoses are key components used to transfer power in heavy industrial machinery. The routing of these hoses is currently performed late in the product design process because no accurate physical models of the hoses exist that allow designers to predict the path the hoses will follow when installed in the machine. Designers must either guess the path the hose will take based on prior experience or wait until the first product prototype is built in order to experiment with the hose routes. This paper describes the use of ADAMS, a commercially available dynamic modeling package, to predict hose paths. The hose path model was verified by comparing the predicted paths to the paths of real hoses