Stress analysis of a sample marine crane’s boom under static loading condition

Celik, Kursat and Caglayan, Nuri and Cinar, R and Ucar, M and Ersoy, H and Rennie, Allan (2012) Stress analysis of a sample marine crane’s boom under static loading condition. In: 5th International Mechanical Engineering Forum 2012 : Proceedings of the. UNSPECIFIED, CZE, pp. 246-256. ISBN 978-80-213-2291-2

Abstract

Marine cranes are important loading/unloading equipment in use at ports for transferring goods to/from marine vessels such as a merchantman. One of the most important design decision criteria for marine cranes is to ensure that the stress magnitudes remain below the maximum allowable stress values on the crane’s structural members during their operation. However, a full scale test to investigate such loading during design validation may be a very expensive practice or almost impossible. Therefore, it is considered more practicable to work with scale models to investigate stress distributions and likely deformations physically. This study presents stress analysis for a sample marine crane’s boom, which is originally designed with a boom length of 9 m using experimental and numerical methods. To enable the experimental part of the study, a 1:10 scale model of a sample marine crane’s boom has been considered. Strain measurement techniques (using strain-gauges) were utilised for the experimental stress measurement of the scale model. Finite Element Method (FEM) as a numerical method was used to map and simulate stress distribution on the scaled boom structure. The results showed that significant information about stress distribution on the crane members could be obtained from FEM simulation. A good correlation between experimental and simulation values of stresses were observed until the boom’s plastic deformation failure.