This document discusses hydraulic machines and presents a student project on a hydraulic pick and place machine. It provides background on hydraulics, explaining that hydraulics deals with mechanical properties of fluids and is used for generating, controlling, and transmitting fluids to produce mechanical work. The basic laws of hydraulics like Pascal's law and relationships between pressure, force and area are then outlined. The document proceeds to describe the students' hydraulic pick and place machine project, which uses syringes as actuators and switches to achieve various motions through water transmission. It details the working mechanism involving different syringe pairs and discusses advantages like many industrial uses and simplicity, as well as disadvantages like needing mechanical input.
1. Indian Institute of Technology
Hyderabad
Hydraulic Machines
By,
Mohammad Arish Lodi
Shashank Zodape
2. What is Hydraulics ?
Hydraulics is a topic in applied science and
engineering dealing with the mechanical properties of
fluids.
On a very basic level Hydraulics is used for the
generation, control, and transmission of fluids in
order to produce some mechanical work or in general
as a part of river engineering.
3. The basic laws of Hydraulics
Fluid Mechanics provides the theoretical foundation of
hydraulics and focuses mainly on its engineering
applications. The basic laws of fluid dynamics that govern
the working of any hydraulic system are:
Pascal's Law: It states that pressure exerted anywhere in
a confined incompressible fluid is transmitted equally in all
directions throughout the fluid
such that the pressure ratio
(initial difference) remains the
same. The siphon, Hydraulic jack,
Hydraulic press and Breaking
system for automobiles are some
examples of application of this law. .
4. The relationship between pressure, force and area is
given by
P=F/AT
This relationship is very useful for obtaining a
mechanical advantage.
As per the Pascal’s law the pressure
in a fluid remains the same every-
where. Which implies that the ratio
of force and area must remain
constant. This fact can be used to
lift greater weights with lesser
forces as shown in the figure.
5. Our Project : The Hydraulic Pick
and Place Machine
Our project is based on the same laws that are
mentioned before.
Syringes are used as actuators as well as the switches.
The medium of transmission is water.
The whole project uses four pair of syringes and in
each pair one syringe is acting as the actuator and the
other one acts as the direction control valve .
We can also use syringes of different diameter. This is
done to make sure that with application of less force
more work can be done that is obtaining a
mechanical advantage.
6. Working Mechanism
The first pair of syringes
is responsible for the
vertical motion of the
mechanical arm.
The second pair of
syringes is employed for
the rotation of the
machine arm.
7. The third pair is used for holding purposes i.e. for the
main pick and place task which our purely
mechanical robot is supposed to perform.
For pick and place task the machine arm contains
two set of jaws : One is fixed jaw while the other is
movable jaw. The movable jaw actually closes or
opens with the forward or backward motion of the
actuator thus leading to holding and dropping the
objects.
In same lines a fifth pair can also be used to extend
the range of the arm or for the rotation of the jaws so
that it can perform more complex tasks with greater
ease.
8. The Advantages and Disadvantages of
this Hydraulic Arm
Advantages:
The robot used can have many industrial uses.
When used in a locomotive format can be of great use
in the production and packaging field.
The simplicity and easy to repair design makes it
really cheap.
Disadvantages:
The input here is mechanical.
Use of electrical circuits can make it much more
simpler to operate and have a better control over it
which is difficult in purely mechanical design.
