Study on the Weight Optimization of Excavator Attachments Considering Durability

굴삭기 작업장치 내구 경량 최적화 기법 연구

The main functions of excavator are mainly carried out by excavator attachments such as arm and boom. These components should be designed to be light as well as durable enough because their effects on the whole structure are significant. In this paper, an optimization procedure for lightweight design considering fatigue strength for excavator attachments is presented. The weight of attachments and allowable fatigue stresses at critical areas are used as objective function and constraints, respectively, in which design variables are the thickness of the plates of attachments. The simulated annealing search method is adopted for a global optimization solution. Besides, the response surface method using the artificial neural network is used to simulate constraint function for the sake of practical fast calculation. Some example case of optimization is presented here for a sample excavator. This weight optimization is expected to contribute to a considerable improvement of fuel efficiency of excavator.