Fundamentals of Fluid Power

This week: An overview of the course, introduction to hydraulics and pneumatics, and introduction to fundamental concepts of fluid power through the cylinder.

This week: circuit diagrams, the written language of fluid power, and how fluid flows through conduits. We hope that you find the hydraulic circuits on the mowing machine as interesting as we did.

This will be a busy week diving into valves and pumps. We will discuss how basic valves function, how to use them in hydraulic circuits, and how to calculate pressure drop for a given flow rate, or vice versa. The videos will directly address the discussion on the forum about seeing hydraulic components working in real world circuits. In our discussion of pumps we will look at many different positive displacement pumps, exploring flow ripple and pump efficiency, look at the supporting components that form a hydraulic power supply, and see how we can make a transmission with a hydraulic pump and a motor. We are now into the heart of this course; we hope you enjoy seeing the components come together into useful circuits.

This week is entirely devoted to you learning how to use Simscape Fluids (formerly SimHydraulics), the fluid power simulation application that we use in the course. The lecture provides an introduction to computer-based, object-oriented simulation, and goes through a demo of using Simscape Fluids. The homework assignment contains the real work because this is where you will learn to use Simscape Fluids. The homework ends with an open-ended problem that encourages you to branch out on your own and create and run simulations based on examples listed in the course Simscape Fluids resource page or on any other fluid power system that interests you. We will be monitoring the discussion boards to help you with any technical problems with Simscape Fluids.

*NOTE: The lecture videos were created using an earlier version of SimHydraulics; some small difference exist with the most recent version of Simscape Fluids, but the general approach is the same. *THERE IS NO QUIZ THIS WEEK as we recognize that a few of you may not be able to get Simscape Fluids running on your computer. Happy simulating!