Study on Estimating Fatigue Life of Main Girder of Portal Crane

In order to correctly understand the information about the life of the crane and to promptly eliminate the potential structural safety hazard of the crane, this paper takes the portal crane as an example to build infinite element model. First of all, the static stress analysis is carried out via infinite element software such as Patran and Nastran to obtain the size and location of the maximum equivalent stress and to verify if the strength and stiffness of the main girder of the portal crane meet the requirements. Secondly, multi-body dynamic simulation software Adams is adopted to construct a virtual prototype, to achieve the motion simulation of the crane working process and to output the loading spectrum in many working conditions. After that, fatigue analysis software - nCode Design-Life is applied to estimate the fatigue life of the portal crane. Finally, the crack propagation life of the portal crane is computed based on the theory of elastic fracture mechanics to verify whether the computing results of infinite elements model are correct.