Parameterized Finite Element Analysis And Optimization Design On Belt Conveyor Pulleys

Belt conveyor is the most important bulk material continuous conveying equipment,related to national economy and people's livelihood.Pulley is the critical component of the belt conveyor and its security and reliability is very important.The structure of driving pulley is very complex,and its friction force changes with central angle exponentially,the traditional analytic method cannot calculate it accurately.Firstly,statics analysis on the pulley was performed with ANSYS.Pulley model closed to reality and retained all the important structure to strive for the exact results.In order to avoid repetitive modeling and repetitive loading process when the pulley size changes,command stream was written with APDL language which is a secondary development tool of ANSYS,to realize the parameterization and the automation of finite element analysis on pulley.In order to reduce the user threshold,the command stream was encapsulated with VB,to develop a finite element analysis software for the pulley.users who are unfamiliar with ANSYS can also use the software to check the stress and stiffness of pulley.In order to accurately simulate the assembly relation between the barrel and the shaft through locking assemblies,contact analysis was performed on the pulley with Workbench.The parameterized pulley-model was built with the modeling tool of Workbench.The types of ten contact pairs on pulley were defined as friction,checking the initial contact information with contact tool to ensure that there were no penetration and gap.The function in workbench were given for working load on the pulley skin.The prestress of locking assemblies and the working load can be applied in sequence by controlling the time step,to accurately simulate the working condition that the pulley bears the working load after installation of locking assemblies.Finally,the multi-objective optimization design was performed for the pulley with Design Exploration in Workbench,discovered the relationship between the weld stress and the structure size,and achieved weight reduction of the pulley,to provide optimization basis for design.