Structural analysis of a machine frame
During a temper oven replacement on one heat treat line we upgraded obsolete horizontal pumps to common and reliable vertical units. This saved floor space and greatly reduces maintenance intervals. I needed to design a frame to hold three pumps over the existing quench tank. It should be sturdy, durable, and ideally make piping installation simple. The shape is overall very simple but the details of the design depend on the exact material shape. Our steel supplier carries a wide selection of shapes and sizes of stainless products. Which one should I use?
The objective is to minimize material cost while holding the pumps and piping stable for the life of the equipment - likely decades. Inventor's frame generator makes this task significantly easier allowing me to draw a 3D skeleton and plop standard structural shapes onto it. It also includes basic structural and modal FEA solvers.
I determined an acceptable specification for deflection once loaded, and also ran modal analysis to ensure the frame did not have a resonance at the pumps operating speed. I set constraints to represent the frame being welded to the existing tank, and loads for the weight of the pumps and connected piping. The most important step to any trustworthy simulation is validating the model against well known results, in this case hand calculations using solid rectangular beams. I then iterated through steel shapes and stock sizes to fit my specifications with the lowest cost material.
The objective is to minimize material cost while holding the pumps and piping stable for the life of the equipment - likely decades. Inventor's frame generator makes this task significantly easier allowing me to draw a 3D skeleton and plop standard structural shapes onto it. It also includes basic structural and modal FEA solvers.
I determined an acceptable specification for deflection once loaded, and also ran modal analysis to ensure the frame did not have a resonance at the pumps operating speed. I set constraints to represent the frame being welded to the existing tank, and loads for the weight of the pumps and connected piping. The most important step to any trustworthy simulation is validating the model against well known results, in this case hand calculations using solid rectangular beams. I then iterated through steel shapes and stock sizes to fit my specifications with the lowest cost material.