Hydraulic manifold machining is challenging to say the least. Traditional CAM software was built for external shapes: contours, pockets, profiles, among others. It was never designed for the inside-out world of hydraulic manifolds, which features a complex internal grid of precisely intersecting holes, cavities, and ports with extremely tight tolerances.
As a result, programming manifold machining into a CNC machine can take hours for each manifold. That was why the team at Paro Software set about to create a new software, HydroCam, to simplify hydraulic manifold CNC programming.
Paro’s HydroCam software simplifies hydraulic manifold design. Here, a screenshot shows clamping functions.
Typically, you import a 3D model and the software attempts feature recognition: analyzing geometry to classify holes, pockets, and profiles. For prismatic parts with simple external features, this works reasonably well.
For manifolds, such a process can break down. You have dozens of intersecting internal holes: cavities, ports, through-drills, threaded connections, many of which share common diameters and depths but require completely different machining sequences depending on their type, not just their geometry. A C10 cavity and a Sun 11A cavity might look geometrically similar but require entirely different tool sequences.
This requires the programmer to be extra careful in reviewing the process, checking each hole manually one-by-one in the model and ensuring it’s correct. If not, machining will be wrong and you will damage material. This process usually requires a skilled operator who knows the parts and can scan and read the schematics to ensure they’re correct. If that person ends up out sick or leaves the company, you’ve lost your knowledge bank.
After several years of development, Paro has officially launched its HydroCam software. It works directly with HydroMan, Paro Software’s manifold design environment, and imports all geometry and coordinate data automatically, generating a ready-to-run CNC program in minutes. It automatically generates precise, accurate CNC programs by reading the intelligent data in HydroMan’s designs. Users can integrate custom manufacturing knowledge, such as drilling strategies, parametric depths and diameters, override feeds and speeds, and defined order of operations.
a view of hydrocam’s editing operations shows how a library-driven workflow ensures consistency in every manifold.
“What we do is we reduce CNC programming time from hours to a couple of minutes,” Marc Paro, CEO, said. “We managed to create the missing link in our product portfolio, because we want to provide the solution where you can be as efficient as possible. People cannot wait two weeks for a design, and then after that, another three months for their hydraulic manifold.”
HydroCam was the next step in Paro’s already existing software platforms. They currently offer HydroMan, which is for designing hydraulic manifolds, and HydroSym, which allows users to create accurate schematics in minutes.
“We thought a hydraulic manifold is nothing else than a translation of a hydraulic schematic, because you define your hydraulic manifold already in your schematic. So we developed a very good tool to draw your hydraulic schematic with,” Paro said. “The combination between HydroMan and HydroSym is a very powerful combination, because it takes over all the intelligence.
hydrocam addresses the challenge of intricate internal features of manifolds.
“We noticed that machining the manifold could take quite a lot of time, because there wasn’t a solution which enables the user to generate and then create a CNC program from the drawing with standard CAM packages. It takes about four, five, up to six hours for a drawing. And we thought, we should do this more efficiently, because we have all the data already within the design. That was the beginning of the start of the development of HydroCam.”
Developing the program took several years because of the complexity but they launched earlier this year after partnering and testing with several manufacturers in Europe.
Initial setup takes time to implement and build the library, so it does require about 20 to 30 days, but once it’s set up, programming time is cut drastically down to minutes. Because you are building a comprehensive set of cavity types across multiple materials, you’re looking at significant setup time. But it’s a one-time cost per sequence, not per manifold.
Image shows a sample of the HydroCam software library.
The library is where you encode your machining knowledge. Each sequence is a named recipe for how to produce a specific type of hole or cavity. A sequence defines:
- Applicability parameters: which cavity types the sequence covers, the range of locating shoulder depths it can handle, which machines and materials it’s valid for.
- Operation list: the ordered list of machining operations: center drill, through drill, form tool passes, threading, reaming, with complete tool assignments and default feeds and speeds.
- Conditional logic: e.g., a conditional pilot drill that is only inserted when the through-drill step doesn’t satisfy the pilot hole requirements for the subsequent form tool.
“Now the three packages are connected to each other. If you have a schematic of a manifold, you can design the manifold within an hour. And once you have designed the manifold, you have got your CNC program built in minutes,” Paro said. “What HydroCam does it is it puts all the knowledge of the manufacturer in a library, which enables them to run the CNC program without making any mistake or without searching for things, because it’s predefined.”
Paro
paro.nl
Filed Under: Components, Engineering software, News, Valves & Manifolds
