Research On Optimization Design Of Free-floating Gate Structure

The dry dock is the main place for shipbuilding operations in the world today.The dock gate is the gate that opens and closes the dock.The mainstream type is the free-floating gate.The traditional free-floating gate uses a large number of plates and profiles,failing to make a good design layout,and the construction economy is not enough.In this paper,the structural optimization design of the 86 m free-floating gate was carried out,and a optimized free-floating gate was proposed,which reduced the overall weight,reduced the construction cost,and achieved a lightweight design.This paper briefly introduced the free-floating gate and its working principle.The finite element technology was used to simulate the structure of the dock gate.The results are in accordance with the specifications under two extreme conditions to ensure the reliability of subsequent optimization.This paper first established the topology optimization area of the free-floating gate,minimized the weight of the optimization target to minimize the volume,and used the variable density method in Optistruct to obtain a optimized free-floating gate,which maintained the strength and rigidity while reducing the weight,strength and stiffness increased by 17.7% and 5.4% respectively,and satisfactory results was obtained under the dangerous conditions of extreme high water level.The size optimization design was carried out with the goal of minimizing the weight.The size optimization was carried out in the Optistruct module of the Hypermesh software.The cell thickness was taken as the optimization object.The plate thickness range was used as the upper and lower limits of the design variables,a nd the constraint conditions was added.The mechanical properties of the structure was significantly enhanced,the maximum stress decreased by 33.5%.Then the section size of the beam was optimized,a fter optimization,the cross-sectional area of the beam was reduced,the weight of the dock gate was significantly reduced by 11.1%,and the strength and stiffness requirements was maintained,the unique effect of size optimization in the detailed design stage was shown.Finally,based on the requirements of the specification,the strength and rigidity of the optimized free-floating gate was checked.At the same time,considering the safety requirements of the working state of the dock gate,and the overall design of the dock gate was checked,the results was in line with the requirements,which indicated the practicality of optimiazed dock gate and provided research directions for future design and analysis.