Structure Optimization And Fatigue Analysis Of The Key Component Of The Slag Pot Carrier

Slag pot carrier is a kind of special vehicle used for transporting and pouring slag in steel plants. As a non-rail transportation equipment, it has the advantages of flexibility, high automation level and small land occupation, which has been widely used in steel plants. It has been over forty years since the introduction of the slag pot carrier to domestic. The working conditions of the vehicle are very bad due to the hot slag it transports. The working arm, one of the key parts of the vehicle is often designed to be bulky in the consideration of safety, which leads to a result of a low material utilization coefficient, it also easily occurs fatigue failure at the same time. Therefore the optimization and the fatigue life analysis of the working arm are of great theoretical significance and engineering reference value.The basic theory of structure optimization and fatigue analysis were expounded in this paper. The vehicle model was established in Pro/E and a dynamic simulation model of the arm mechanism was built in MSC.Adams software to simulate the processes of loading, transporting and pouring of slag pot, and nine harsh working conditions of the working arm were obtained.A finite element model of 1/2 working arm was built by using of Hypermesh, and the finite element analysis(FEA) of the nine cases was carried out, found that the stress of most area is very low, the working arm needs to be optimized. By employing the variable density method, the topology optimization analysis was carried out by using of Optistruct with the minimum compliance as the objective function and the volume fraction as well as the Von Mise stress as the constraint function based on the FEA result, and a fabrication process was taken. The result showed that the weight of the optimized model decreased by 15.3% compared to the original model under the same working conditions.In order to execute the fatigue analysis, one work cycle of the arm mechanism was subdivided into 31 working conditions, and a FEA of these cases was carried out; the SN curve of the working arm’s material Q345 B was created according to its fatigue properties; a load spectrum corresponding to the 31 working conditions was created based on the entire working process of the mechanism. The fatigue analysis software MSC.Fatigue was employed to do the fatigue analysis of the original and optimized model based on the S-N whole life method and their fatigue lives were concluded respectively.