Research Of Design Tool For Cantilever Of The Jack-Up Platform

In the design process of the Jack-up platform, the design of cantilever beam is very important for the global operational capacity of the platform. During the platform's design, the global design scheme needs to be modified due to many factors, the platform also needs to be modified, so the cantilever beam needs to be modified in size. The structural calculation and verification must be made for each revising. The most reliable of structural calculation is the finite element analysis program. It is a complex and time-consuming work to establish the finite element structural model of the cantilever and it will be tremendous workload if the design model frequent changes. Accordingly it will be of significance to study and develop a tool which can make parameters design, finite element modeling, loading, analysis and generating graphics and so on.To solve the above problem, the writer does some research in the creation of parametric modeling and drawing graphics for the cantilever of jack-up platform based on VB6.0. The writer made achievement of visualization of a system of input parameters, the main contents are as following:1 Some researches were made among the length of the drilling area, the connecting area and the deck and the mutual location of the common framework and the strengthened framework, and the parametric modeling was succeeded in them. The relationships were analyzed about various dimensions of the cantilever, and some parameters which influence on the cantilever mostly were found. The forces and constraints of the cantilever which was in different overhangs and transverses were studied, and the parametric loading was also succeeded in them.2 A system was succeeded on the basis of the cantilever structure of NH4 platform and ANSYS software, which can make the user input less parameters and generate the cantilever modeling and loading order flow rapidly, then it call ANSYS FEM analysis computation, finally, the results can be extracted from the analysis.3 The system can call the AutoCAD through OLE based on VB6.0. It also can generate the three-view graphics of the cantilever and other graphics quickly.In this paper, on the thinking of parametric modeling, analysis and mapping, the entire parameter model of the cantilever was established. So that the designer can complete the finite element model and the entire mapping work by making some modification of some parameters, it can reduce the workload of the designer greatly.