| With the growing number of bridges, the maintenance and inspection of existent bridges becomes urgent. Bridge inspection vehicle provides an easy and safe access to underbridge positions for bridge service personals. Therefore it is very important to ensure the bridge inspection vehicle's stability. This means that the designer must take into account the stability conditions at the initial design stage. Just because the bridge inspection vehicle is very expensive and demands high safety levels, it is unrealistic to have many physical prototype experiments. With the help of using Virtual Prototyping technology, the designer can simulate the working processes of the bridge inspection vehicle in a virtual environment, and perform a lot of design experiments till to get an optimized solution.This article provides a virtual prototyping of the bridge inspection vehicle. First, based on the initial design of the bridge inspection vehicle, a 3-D model of the vehicle was created by using SolidWorks. Then the 3-D model was converted to ADAMS through Parasolid format. By defining rigid body and its connections, imposing motion, the virtual prototyping model of the bridge inspection vehicle was created. Two different ways of the bridge inspection vehicle's unfolding working process were introduced and then kinematics simulations of its unfolding working process were performed. During the simulation process the trajectory of the resultant gravity center of the whole system was obtained. With the analysis of trajectory of the resultant gravity center, the stability of the bridge inspection vehicle's unfolding working process was confirmed and the most disadvantage position of its working stability during its unfolding process was determined. The advantages and disadvantages of the two different ways of unfolding were discussed. The minimum mount of balancing weights to ensure the working stability of the bridge inspection vehicle was determined under a realistic safety coefficient and the balancing weights were distributed properly. Optimization design of the location of a hydraulic cylinder was performed in ADAMS, as a result the working pressure of the hydraulic cylinder was reduced. |
