Researches On Parametric Finite Element Analysis Of Crawler Crane Boom Systems

As the key parts of crawler cranes, the booms are the spatial girder grillages, which generally adopt the finite element method to aid design. During the design and strength calculating of the boom system, the process "preliminary design-modeling-analysis-revision-re-design-re-modeling-re-analysis" are carried out repeatedly. According to the requirement of FEA(Finte Element Analysis) soft, every revision of the structure need to rebuild the finite element model, so there must be plenty of repeat work. What's more, for crawler cranes have many cases, a large number of models need to build while conducting finte element analysis.To solve the problems mentioned above, the author studies the boom structure, the pramatric technology, the parametric finite element analysis, the active automation technology, the VB programming, and data base technology carefully, and propose the parametric finite element analysis solution of crawler crane boom systems. The main research work and achievements are as follows:(1) On the base of studying the pramatric technology, the parametric finite element analysis and the boom structure, the feasibility of adopting parametric finite element analysis to aid the boom system design is reasoned.(2) The defects of the existing parametric FEA method are analyzed. Then combine the parametric technology with finite element analysis, thereby a parametric assembly modeling method of FEA is proposed. First build parametric parts models, and then creat parametric assembly models based on the gallery of prametric parts.(3) The parametric FEA in ANSYS is realized. Fix the design varialbles follows the method of sifting through parameters, then write the parametric FEA programes of parts and assemblys using APDL language, that ANSYS applyes.(4) A special FEA soft of crawler crane boom systems is developed, which encapsulation all the ANSYS operations. It's possible that the users can concentrate their attention on design variables, and no need to care the generation of the finite element models and calling ANSYS to calculate.At the end of the paper, an FEA example of 260t crawler crane boom systems is given to reason the scientificity and the fesibility of the method proposed, and the practicability of the soft developed.