Hydra Products Bespoke Hydraulic Manifold Design
Hydraproducts provides bespoke hydraulic manifold design and manufacture, from concept circuit design, through to manifold assembly and test. Our design process helps customers through the hydraulic design process through to product realization and integration.
Our hydraulic specialists then use Visio Hydraw software suite to develop both the hydraulic schematic and a manifold outline. After the design is agreed, the 3d Models can be exported for incorporating into machinery designs.
Custom hydraulic manifolds integrate a variety of functions into a single product. They reduce system pipework by reducing the number of connections, thus reducing potential leak points. Custom hydraulic manifolds can be flexibility in their design and are compact and reliable.
Functional components integrated into the custom manifold, such as screw-in or slip-in cartridge valves, are more readily removed for servicing. Valves are selected from world-class valve manufacturers, ensuring worldwide availability and interchangeability. The compact nature of a manifold system means that space and weight is reduced along with overall machine assembly time.
Manifold themselves can be manufactured in either ductile steel and aluminum. The selection can be critical for product reliability and safety. The following factors should be considered:
System pressures consistently above 250bar, ductile steel is preferred. With normal pressure near this level but with pressure “spikes” above 250bar then ductile steel should be considered.
Environmental protection will commonly be applied to the manifold be it anodizing for aluminum or electro-plating for ductile steel.
Aluminum is less costly due to lower material cost and ease of machining.
These custom manifolds or integrated valve systems can be particularly useful to OEMs as this process can be modified for the OEMs equipment and specific application. This makes the final customized valve and manifold assembly a proprietary item for the OEM, reducing stock levels and procurement overhead.