Structural Design And Optimization Of Stacker Reclaimer Mast

Stacker-reclaimer is a large equipment in the port stockyard, storage yard, mining machinery plants and chemical plants, and plays a leading role in the process of handling, transportation and storage. Meanwhile, the stability and reliability of stacker-reclaimer decide the company’s productivity, efficiency and effectiveness from the actual use. The use of high stability and reliability comes from design of structure, and the demands of the market.Gantry luffing mechanism is the mechanical structure for reclaimer rake changed by rope to achieve degrees of changing to adapt to stockpile. The design of three nodes affects the force and stress distribution trends of the reclaimer directly, and affect the design of section for the mast, which belongs preliminary studies for stacker-reclaimer design. Mast is the main bearing mechanism of the stacker-reclaimer, and the optimization of section is related to the merits of the overall system design directly. The overall design for traditional method of section optimization is apply to foreign products or past design from experience, and then verifying the feasibility by the design simulation software, modifying original design through checking the results, checking the model repeatedly for the purpose optimization design, this repeated modified method is time-consuming, and can’t be the most optimal results because of no theoretical basis to support. The paper takes stacker reclaimer for the study from a company, and applies proven methods on the optimization of structure design.This paper has been done a full research on the reclaimer, takes analysis on the luffing mechanism and mechanical properties, obtained movement equation and mechanical equation of the reclaimer rake, calculates the change of force for each hinge point according to the arrangement of the hinge point. Getting the angle of the rope changing with time and force of changing with angle by kinematic simulation software ADAMS, verifies the reliability and accuracy of the numerical model and the simulation model.Analyzes the influence on the maximum force of the luffing rope according to the force equation of three-hinged nodes, establishes optimized model of three nodes for luffing mechanism and optimize the model by genetic toolbox of MATLAB based on genetic algorithm.Loading the force from the results of three nodes optimization above on the structure of the mast, do the numerical optimization on the section of the mast, getting the optimal results and improving the force of the mast.Finally, establishing finite element model of the mast, loading and optimizing through secondary development of the programming ANSYS parametric design language APDL of finite element analysis software ANSYS, according to actual working condition of the stacker-reclaimer, verifying the correctness of optimization by doing comparison between optimization results.