Abstract
The piping route of hydraulic hose is designed with avoiding interferences to surrounding components. However, in a real practice, the piping route is mostly decided with an expert's experiences on site due to the complexity of design. Thus, this paper proposes a design methodology of the optimized route of a hose. We use NURBS representation to describe the piping route, which is possible to be locally modified, and an energy minimization method is applied to avoid interferences to the surroundings. In other words, the NURBS curve describing a piping route is modified to meet the desired positions from minimizing the perturbation of the control points, and the strain energy of the curve is then optimized to make the curve natural. The proposed method is implemented and its feasibility is validated using the commercial CAD software, CATIA V5.