CATIA-based FEA Of Belt Conveyor Drive Pulley And Secondary Development

In bulk material handing field, belt conveyor is irreplaceable. As a vital part of belt conveyor, it is closely related to the normal operation of belt conveyor. Therefore, the insiders have paid close attention to the structure and force analysis of drive pulley. Both with the development of computer technology and the increasing maturity of the finite element theory, the finite element analysis is gradually becoming an important method for the pulley design. What's more, it has the high practical value for pulley designers to take secondary development and get a set of professional CAD/CAE/CAM software on pulley analysis to improve work efficiency.First, the research level, development condition of drive pulley and secondary development at home and abroad are discussed comprehensively in this paper Second, it makes a deep discussion on the pulley structure types, transmission principle, force analysis and failures of drive pulley, and deducing the distribution law and design formulas of the force which are based on the different directions. And then introducing the pulley design method in detail, based on the hypothesis that the radial load of the pulley following the uniform distribution on the axial direction, a new discrete load method is used, the load on drive pulley's working surface is calculated, and then the stress and pressure on the working surface of the drive pulley are obtained. In CATIA software, the simplified drive pulley model is established focus on a typical belt conveyor, the static analysis, the modal analysis and the harmonic response analysis are conducted. then the maximum stress, displacement and its positions are obtained through static analysis. The natural frequencies and the corresponding amplitudes of 6 orders are also obtained through modal analysis; the influence of the low frequency harmonic load on the drive pulley is revealed through the harmonic response analysis. then the dynamic characteristics of the pulley under two different starting conditions are analyzed in detail, and the position of instantaneous maximum stress and strain value of the drive pulley are obtained. The above analysis has guiding significance for the design and optimization of the drive pulley.Based on Visual Basic 6.0 development tools, the CATIA are secondary developed and a complete set of parameterized form is successfully created. It can realize the automatic generation and finite element analysis of the pulley model, the design process is simplified, and the design efficiency is improved and the design method of the pulley is enriched.