The Institute for Mechanical Engineering Design of the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg is developing a product model based tool for application engineering of hydrostatic systems, which supports the early stages of product design. To guarantee that all employees of the company have access to product data and design knowledge via Intranet the tool is WEB-based. Increased data processing support especially in the early stages of product development requires computer supported acquisition of the task, which is offered by the tool. Additionally different modules support the solution identification process by supplying design experience and giving access to realized solutions. Circuit diagram creation, selection of components, system simulation, error estimation and 3D-layout of the hydrostatic system are also supported by the tool. The central component of the projecting tool is a product model, defined especially for hydrostatic systems, in which all product specific analysis and synthesis data are stored. The design of the hydrostatic system, thus the filling of the current product model with information, takes place with help of IT-tools, which support the several stages of product design, following the VDI guideline 2221 [1].
Design of Hydrostatic Systems, namely control-systems and especially hydraulic manifolds is “the up to date” subject of „by hand” designers; CAD-support can be found as a tool to reproduce a handmade layout for interference checking, presentation and make of production drawings. To create a higher efficiency a CAD-tool must be extended for this special task, so that some of the calculations and checking of the constraints can be done internally by the program and are immediately available.
Due to this situation the „Arbeitsbereich Konstruktionstechnik I” started to build a design system based on an object-oriented 3D-CAD-modeller. With the object-oriented programming it is possible to create product models that contain not only geometric data but also technical and administrative data that are necessary for calculations and constraint checking. Based on this technology product models for hydrostatic components are evaluated and used in the new design system.