New Design Concept for a Lifting Platform Made of Composite Material
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New Design Concept for a Lifting Platform Made of Composite Material L. Solazzi & R. Scalmana
Received: 27 July 2012 / Accepted: 30 July 2012 / Published online: 14 September 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract Elevating work platforms are hoists equipment that are increasingly used in many applications, like in the construction industry and in the maintenance field. The maintenance of the hub of the wind turbines, for example, can be done through the use of a working platform; these structures have to reach great heights and obviously they have to satisfy the constraints induced by the highway standards, like the maximum axle load and the maximum overall dimensions. To satisfy these requests the material of the structures changed from the classic structural steel (S235 JR, S275 JR or S355JR) to high strength steel (S700 to S1100 or more), characterized by a significantly higher specific resistance. The idea of this paper is to use a composite material for the construction of the arms of an elevating platform in order to reduce the global weight of the machine. The analyses on the new kind of platform show the technical possibility to change the material of the arms with composite materials and this produces a significant reduction of the weight of the machine components, about 50 %. Being a feasibility study, still remain open some problems such as the mechanical behavior of the used composite materials (fatigue, environment effects, etc.). Keywords Composite structures design . Carbon fiber . Lifting platform
1 Introduction Great highs platforms had a great diffusion in recent years (Fig. 1); its development was made possible thanks to the usage of high strength steels, able to optimize the mechanical characteristics and allowing in this way the weight reduction: in fact is fundamental in a movable structure to keep under control this peculiarity in order to guarantee the road transport. L. Solazzi (*) : R. Scalmana Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Brescia, via Branze, 38, Brescia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
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Appl Compos Mater (2013) 20:615–626
Fig. 1 A steel platform working on a wind turbine
However, the height of these structures is increasing constantly, bringing to their limit the transport possibilities. The aim of this work is the design of a work platform with arms made both by high strength steel and by composite materials and its comparison it with a platform made only by high strength steel. The platform is designed to work at a height of 85 m; which represents a very high size for the Italian market. There are prototypes constructed using for the different components (arms, cylinders, joints) metallic materials, mostly high strength steel alloys that are increasingly used in work machines like equipment for the handling of materials [1, 2] and truck components [3–5], which show great problems due to the great weight and also to the transport of the platform structure; actually a small portion of the jib (the last part of the te
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