Knowledge-based assistant for component selection and preliminary design of hydrostatic drives.

A rule-based expert system, called HSTX, was developed to aid in the selection and sizing of the major components – pump, motor, and final drive – of a hydrostatic transmission. The program analyzes the load, sizes components, selects available components from a database, evaluates system performance, and makes recommendations on changes to improve performance. HSTX presently handles only single-path hydrostatic transmission configurations. Evaluation indicates that HSTX can be effectively used by a person with a background in hydraulic systems, but with little background in hydrostatic transmission design.