The FEA And Optimization Of Ship Crane Boom

With the development of global economic integration and the increasing international trade, the ship crane plays more important role in water transportation as corollary equipment. The ship crane is a kind of crane which is specialized in maritime lifting heavy loads. Its application is very extensive, such as it is set on the deck of a ship to lift and move the goods and also used for cross-sea bridge construction and offshore oil drilling platform construction. The ship crane is moving towards the trend of large lifting capacity and low weight. Boom as the core component of the crane, whose weight is about 1/5 of the whole machine, directly bears the lifting load and other loads. So its design level has a direct effect on performance and weight of the whole machine. To enhanced the competitiveness of ship crane enterprise in the market, design of ship crane boom should not only meet the strength, stiffness, stability and so on, should also minimize the weight of boom and reduce the manufacturing cost and using energy consumption. This article takes a 25m/10 t ship crane as research object. The strength and stiffness of the boom is analyzed by the finite element software. Based on finite element analysis of boom, the optimization design about the dimensions of the boom cross section is carried out to meet its economic and security requirements.Firstly, the ship crane working principle is expounded and calculation about strength of ship crane boom is carried out by the traditional analytic method, which is prepared for the finite element analysis.Secondly, a reasonable and necessary simplified scheme is put forward and a model of boom is established by SolidWorks. The model is imported into ANSYS Workbench for finite element statics analysis, modal analysis and buckling analysis. Through the finite element static analysis of boom with different elevation angles, the strength and stiffness of boom meet the requirements and there is a certain optimum amount of surplus is found. Through the modal analysis, the natural frequencies and vibration modes of the boom are obtained, which verify that its dynamic stiffness meet the requirements and the relevant points for attention are put forward. Through buckling analysis, the buckling load factor and the vibration pattern can be obtained. The critical stress value and the position of buckling of the boom can be determined. The stability of the boom meet the requirements under the two extreme conditions is found.Finally, the optimal Latin Hypercube Sampling Design and response surface method are applied in the particle swarm optimization to get a new boom cross section size which meet the requirements of strength and stiffness. The Final optimization results show that the weight of boom decrease by 15.3%, which can bring considerable economic benefits.In this paper, a set of processes containing parametric modeling, finite element simulation, experimental design, construction of the response surface approximation model and the particle swarm optimization algorithm, can provide a reference for optimization design of other engineering structures.