Weight-reduction Design Of Steel Ladle Basedon Structural Optimization

With the continuous development of the global steel industry,steel smelting technology gradually tends to the way of high efficiency,energy conservation and environment friendly,the trend also makes new demands on the steel smelting equipment.In the traditional design process of smelting equipment,because lots of safety factors need to be considered,it is easy to cause the safety factor of smelting equipment get oversize,and make the structure overweight,which would result in the increase of production costs and resources,waste phenomenon is also serious.Therefore the weight-reduction design of steel smelting equipment is necessary.Based on related research in China and abroad,this paper focus on the weight-reduction design of ladle,summarizes the technology approach of weight-reduction design and takes a type of ladle as an example to analyze and validate.Solidworks software is used to build 3D models of the ladle,then,FEM model could be built via geometry cleanup,mesh generation and boundary condition option in Hypermesh software.FEM method is applied to analyze strength and stiffness of the ladle in OptiStruct software,and obtain its stress concentration area and maximum displacement deformation.The results show that the strength of the ladle meets the design requirements.Based on OptiStruct platform,various weight-reduction design methods are compared and analyzed,and then the theory of topology optimization is used to perform structural concept design,parametric structural dimensions and standardize sectional dimensions.Genetic algorithm is combined with a variety of parallel finite element software to find the structure of ladle with higher safety,lighter quality and better performance.After optimizing the design,the weight of the ladle is decreased by 18.65%than before,which could achieve the goal of weight-reduction design,and the applicability of the proposed method is also verified.