Telescopic Boom’s Structural Design And Finite Element Of Aerial Work Platform Truck

Overhead working truck is a manned vehicle which takes workers and working tools to the targeted high locations. With the development of economy and the increase of labor cost in our country, the demands for overhead working truck are increasing. As the overhead working trucks are usually used to locate working persons, safety must be a most important issue which must be seriously considered for the design. This paper takes a certain telescopic overhead working truck as the research object and uses the finite element method to analyze and optimize the telescopic boom structure.Under the conditions of the same total height, the same total width and the same wall-thickness of the telescopic booms, several commonly used cross-sectional shapes such as rectangle, pentagon, hexagon and U shape are all examined. Both strength and buckling constraints are considered. Suggestions are given to choose the most appropriate sectional shapes for specific overhead working truck under given loading conditions. The ANSYS parametric design language(APDL) was used to built parametric finite element model for the overhead working truck studied. The actual working conditions were used to apply boundary conditions for the finite element model. General purpose contact analysis technology was implemented to simulate the interactive contacts between all the adjacent sliding contact booms. The detailed information for both the stiffness and the strength could be obtained from the analysis results of finite element model. To improve the computational efficiency, sub-modeling technique was also used to work out the detailed contact results in the vicinity of the contact points of the adjacent booms. The effects of the slider materials to the maximum contact stress and the stiffness of the contact pairs were also studied. Structural optimization of the telescopic boom system was conducted to minimize the total weight of the structure. In addition to the strength condition, the local instability constraint was also considered when implementing the optimization process. The methodology used in this paper may provide theoretical guidance for the design of the similar types of overhead working trucks.