Composite Structure Of Steel-concrete Conterweight Design And FEA For Motor Grader

As special working equipment, engineering machine’s weight has significant impact on working ability, such as excavator, wheel loader, motor grader and tractor dozer; their performance is depend on the machine weight. One of an important components on those machines named “counterweight”, provides balancing machine, increase machines working capability, and protect machine from damaged by other equipments. They are made of casting or fabrication normally and price is 5-6 RMB/Kg. The total cost is very high due to hundreds kilogram to dozens tons of weight. One of the effective ways to reduce the cost is using steel-concrete instead of metallic, which could reduce the cost by 80%. But due to the special structure of steel-concrete, there is leak of mechanics analysis and researching.This research is based on motor grader counterweight application, with target of cost reduction. FEA model was designed with ABAQUS tool, and contact setting for steel and concrete was corrected after several tried. The stress and displacement result of FEA in static 20 tons load, shown the steel and concrete been enforced each other with the composite structure,specially for the stell shell, anti form ablity increased by70 times than it self, compare with the result of steel shell and concrete block only. And the FEA result of comparison with casting conterweigtht shown that the possibility of using steel-concrete counterweight instead of steel in the static load case.The motor grader impact testing was further designed, velocity and acceleration’s relationship in the different initial speed were got, which is the input setting for dynamic analysis. The original deign fault was found after FEA simulation of impact analysis with 3 different initial speed. Steel-concrete conunterweight’s dynamic mechanical property was got. With the result, counterweight design was inproved. The result of FEA impact test for improved model show the displacement area reduced by 70% and the max transform depth reduced by 65%, which was acceptable for the motor grader application.