ANALYSIS OF WELDED STRUCTURE

Autor: Hugo Martin

Example for: Update of a 3D structure of welded frames and slides with

FEA to prove stiffness and iterative improvement.

This example is something where weve got a couple of pumps and a couple of compressors.
This particular one is designed where it is just picked up with a forklift.

The first thing we are going to do is just an analysis whether it can hold the weight and then
we are going to look at as the engine and pumps are running we are going to look at a
vibration analysis. For this we are going to not look at entire assembly, we are going to go to
just framework
In this case because we are mimicking this structure getting picked up by the forklift we are
fixing the joints at the end of each portlet channel.

When we get into our loads, we can apply the load to an entire bean, so thats what weve
done. Because were taking the pumps out we take the compressors out and we are just
replacing them with the force. We are taking two channels that the engine was setting on,
applying into the entire bean and its going to be 1000 kg (just for the example). And the same
for the compressors, its going to be 2000 kg.

When we make the mesh, the round pipes are used only to display. The software actually took
the cross section into account.
We can see that we have about 190 MPa stress. The material that we choose is alloy steel
which has a yield strength of about 620 MPa. That gives us a factor of safety in excess of 3x.

We take a look at the displacements,

We have a displacement of 11.42 mm in Y direction.

This structure can easily handle the 4000 kg that we placed on it, without huge
displacements. If we want to reduce the displacements we could change the cross section of
the lateral channels, instead of use square profiles, we could use rectangular profiles.
If we run again the static analysis, we can see that the displacement has been halved; now it is
only a displacement of 6.5 mm.

We could see too the moment diagrams of each beans.

Or the shear diagrams in order to determinate the stress in the welding and take necessary
decisions, in order to increase the structure rigidity.

I hope that I have demonstrated my skills using SolidWorks analyzing a

welded structure. If you are interested, I would like to work in this project,
do not hesitate to contact me.