The Research And Development Of Wooden Pallet's Design Theory & Method And Its CAD/CAE System

Pallet is the basic unit of the consolidation for the products during storage and transportation and it is widely used in product's distribution chain. Wooden pallet contains wood pallet, plywood pallet, bamboo-wood composed pallet, wood-plastic composed pallet and so on, and its material is wood and wood based material.The pallet industry of our country has several serious problems for many years, for example, the design theory and design method are imperfect, the testing methods are not standardized and the basical technology parameters are lacking. These problems always cause pallet which is not suitable for product after design, on one hand, large amounts of pallets are easy to be damaged during distribution, on the other hand, many manufacturers want to improve the pallet's safety by over using the wood and it causes big waste of material. So research the pallet's mechanical property and influenceing factors can provide the academic base for the wooden pallet's design and production, and it is also meaningful for using the wood resource reasonablely and protecting the environmentIn allusion to the problem of our country's wooden pallet in design and application, the influencing factors of the mechanical property were analysed based on some associated academic subjects, the models of some common types of pallet were developed and the formulae of them were also developed under uniform load and concentrated load. It could provide the academic basis for the design and test of the pallet.The market research was made in several companies, and the follow-up investigation of the pallets during distribution was made too, the reason of the pallet's damage was analyses then. The design method and design procedure were discussed and several common type of pallet's design formulae and inspection formulae were developed according to the design theory, the manufacture's design courses, and the test's requirement. It could bring the convenience to the designer effectively.A wooden pallet CAD/CAE system was developed according to the research above. This system has several functions: it can guide the designer to design pallet, can hope the designer to design the common styles of pallet, can analyse the feasibility and the cost of the designed pallet, can hope the designer to search the date of the designed pallet and hope the designer to manage the date. It can decrease the designer's time and reduce the company's design cost.