Feasibility study of a very big crawler crane using composite materials

The main goal of this research is to design a very big crawler crane adopting composite material to lightweight the machine itself and compare its performance with the one made of classical structural steel. The research starts by sizing the main boom, assuming three different materials: steel, aluminium alloy and composite material. Many load conditions were involved and different criteria were assumed; there are stress safety factors, stiffness, dynamic performance (modal) and buckling phenomenon which is a very important parameter. Then other innovative load conditions were applied to the crane boom: moving load and time-varying wind speed to study the mechanical behaviour of the new solutions. The last step involves the design of additional elements: counter boom, counterweight, ropes, etc., and evaluating the final weight of the entire machine designed with innovative materials. In particular, the weight of the machine in steel configuration is about 5715 kN while this value reduces to 4670 kN and 3830 kN respectively for aluminum and composite material configurations. In other words, for the composite material solution, the final weight is about 67 % of the same machine built with steel, this value decreases to 34 % if only the main boom is evaluated.