Pressure Losses in Multiple-Elbow Paths and in V-Bends of Hydraulic Manifolds

Hydraulic manifolds are used to realize compact circuit layouts, but may introduce high pressure losses in the system because their design is usually oriented to achieving minimum size and weight more than reducing the pressure losses. The purpose of this work is to obtain the pressure losses when the internal connections within the manifold are creating complex paths for the fluid and the total loss cannot be calculated simply as the sum of the single losses. To perform the analysis both Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) analysis and experimental tests have been executed. After the comparison between numerical and experimental results, it was possible to assess that the numerical analysis developed in this work is able to depict the correct trends of the pressure losses also when complex fluid path are realized in the manifold. Successively, the numerical analysis was used to calculate the pressure loss for inclined connections of channels (or V-bends), a solution that is sometimes adopted in manifolds to meet the design requirements aimed towards the minimum room-minimum weight objective.