2010 Third International Conference on Intelligent Networks and Intelligent Systems

An Optimal Structure Designing of Belt Pulley

Ma Xingguo Wang Yanling Zhou Mingyu
Research Institute North Heavy Industry Research Institute Shenyang,Liaoning , P.R.C e-mail: zmy1980123@126.com

Mechanical Engineering school Shenyang Ligong University Shenyang,Liaoning , P.R.C e-mailmaxingguo1234@sina.com

AbstractA structural optimization mathematical model of the belt pulley was constructed. The structure of the belt pulley with constant section was optimized by sub-question approximate method based on ANSYS. The quality of the belt pulley was obviously decreased after optimization, and the structure of the belt pulley was more reasonable. Keywords- optimal design; belt pulley ;ANSYS
TABLE I.
Parameter type

MECHANICAS AND MATERIAL PARAMETERS OF THE

BELT PULLEY

Parameter meaning

Parameter Symbol

parameter values

Mechanical Parameter

tensile force of belt wrap angle belt width elastic modulus poisson's ratio material density

F b E

25KN 120 1500mm 2.1x105MPa 0.3 7.8x10-6kg/mm3

I.

INTRODUCTION
Material Parameter

Pulley is main bearing part of the belt conveyor, its reliability and life directly affect the belt conveyor on its performance. An excessive and conservative safety factor often be used in design by empirical formula method and the analogy method, which will lead to an increase of weight and manufacturing costs of the belt pulley. The quality of the belt pulley with same power made in China is about 1.3 times as much as the quality of that made in the United States and Japan[1]. In the belt pulley, one part has an interaction with others on strength and stiffness, thus a independent increase on size of some parts may take an adverse effect on other parts. Therefore, increasing size simply can not prevent failure of the belt pulley effectively. To ensure the stiffness and the strength of the belt pulley, FEA(Finite Element Analysis) is needed to analyze the stress precisely. Furthermore, the structure optimization of the belt pulley will decrease the weight and make cost down. The paper researches the mathematical model and method of the optimal design of the belt pulley. II.
OPTIMAL DESIGN OF BELT PULLEY STRUCTURE

TABLE II.
Parameter Symbol

STRUCTURE PARAMETERS OF THE BELT PULLEY

Parameter meaning Value Parameter (mm) symbol Parameter meaning Value (mm)

b1 b2 b3 b4 b5 d1

bearing span 2400 shell width 1800 spoke span 1600 wheel width 140 shaft shoulder 10 bearing inner diam. 80

l t1 t2 d2 d3 d4

shaft length shell of thickness spoke thickness shell of diameter hub diameter shaft diameter

128 14 14 610 220 140

A. Structure and parameters of the pulley The belt pulley with constant section, as shown in Fig.1, is the object of optimal design. The belt pulley includes shell, spoke, hub and pulley shaft. All components of the belt pulley are assumed to be made of same material to simplify the calculation. Mechanics and material parameters of the belt pulley are shown in table 1. Structure parameters of the belt pulley are shown in table 2.

Figure 1.

Structure schematic diagram of the belt pulley

B. Finite element analysis of strength of the belt pulley Loads on the belt pulley are as follows: Pulley deadweight. It can be applied by means of density and gravitational acceleration. Normal force on the surface of the belt pulley.The force is regard as a uniform load, its radial specific pressure can be determined by Equation1 2F MPa (1) q= b d2 Inertial force came from pulley angular velocity. Applying restraints on the belt pulley is important for strength analysis. The restraints applying must follow the principles below: The rigid body motion must be eliminated by applying restraints, which can make the stiffness matrices nonsingularity to obtain the exact solution of displacement. Spare restraints can not exist. Spare restraints can cause additional binding forces that do not exist actually. In such a case, the calculating stiffness of parts increase and the results are not right. According to the parameters and discussions abovethe equivalent stress of each component can be obtained by ANSYS. The maximum stress of the shell is 9.539MPa that occurs on the welding seam between the shell and the spoke,
687

978-0-7695-4249-2/10 $26.00 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICINIS.2010.72

as shown in Fig.2. The maximum stress of pulley shaft is 73.443MPa that occurs on the position of bearing restrains, as shown in Fig.3. The maximum stress of spoke is 45.536MPa that occurs on the hub joints, as shown in Fig.4. The maximum stress of hub is 9.9MPa that occurs on the contacts of hub and pulley shaft, as shown in Fig.5. According to the results of the static analysis, the pulley has an excess strength and stiffness in design. Thus, structure optimization of the pulley can make the pulleys

quality the smallest, meanwhile, the strength and stiffness of pulley are enough for safety. III. ESTABLISHMENT OF OPTIMAL MATHEMATICAL MODEL A. Selection of optimization variables Design variables are independent variables, the optimal result is a function of the variables. The part selected to be optimized should satisfy requests below: The part quality takes the great proportion to the quality of the pulley. Decrease of the part quality has no remarkable influence on strength and stiffness of the pulley. Through analyzing the influence of each part on the pulley, the shell thickness (t1), spoke thickness (t2), wheel hub outer diameter (d3), pulley shaft diameter (d4) and wheel hub thickness (b4) are defined as design variables for optimization, that is:

Figure 2.

The stress nephogram of the shell

X = [ x1 , x2 , x3 , x4 , x5 ]T = [t1 , t2 , d3 , d 4 , b4 ]T
B. Determination of constraint conditions As state variables or dependent variables, constraint conditions are the functions of the design variables. In the pulley design, the radial deformation of the shell and the deflection of the shaft are limited in certain scope to prevent a drop of the belt. To prevent the fatigue, the maximum stress of the spoke, the wheel hub, the shell and the shaft must be less than their fatigue limits. Therefore, the maximum stress above is less than the allowable stress 80MPa without considering the pulley vibration. The maximum deflection of the shaft is less than 1/3000 length of the shaft. The maximum radial deformation of the shell is less than 1/3000 length of the shell. The constraint conditions are:
g m ( X ) 80 0; m = 1, 2, 5 b2 0 g1 ( X ) 3000 b +l g4 ( X ) 1 0 3000

Figure 3.

The stress nephogram of the shaft

(2)

Figure 4.

The stress nephogram of the spoke

where, X is the design variable, and g m ( X ) are the performance constraint. C. Determination of the objective function The objective function f ( X ) is defined to minimize the total mass of the pulley. If the material density of each component of the pulley is the same, the total mass of the pulley can be replaced with the bulk volume of the pulley. The goal of optimization is to minimize the objective function. (3) minV = f ( X )

Figure 5.

The stress nephogram of the hub

688

IV.

ANALYSIS OF RESULTS OF THE PULLEY OPTIMIZATION

The loop command(OPEXE) and over 60 times cyclic iteration are implemented on ANSYS with sub-problem approximation method. Twenty two group feasible optimal sequences and the optimal result are obtained. A. Variations of design variables The parameters vary with iterative process, symbol*indicates the best data that is group 22, as shown in Table3. According to the maximum approximate principle, the best results are obtained after rounding
X = [t1 , t 2 , d 3 , d 4 , b4 ] = [10,10,365,120, 52]
T T

The parameters vary with iterative process, as shown in Figure6. Fig.6 (a) demonstrates the variations of the outer diameter of wheel hub(d3), the thickness of wheel hub (b4) and the diameter of the pulley shaft (d4) in the iterative process. Fig.6 (b) demonstrates the variations of the shell thickness (t1), the spoke thickness (t2) in the iterative process. B. Variations of state variables and objective variables The state variables vary with iterative process, as shown in Fig.7. The maximum stress varies with iterative process, as shown in Fig.7(a). The maximum radial displacement of shell and the maximum deflection of the shaft vary with iterative process, as shown in Fig.7(b). The objective function that is the total volume of the pulley varies with iterative process is shown in Fig.8. The variations of the state variables and the objective variables are shown in table4.
TABLE III. VARIATIONS OF DESIGN VARIABLES
Iiterations Shell thickness (t1)/mm spoke thickness (t2) /mm hub diameter (d3)/mm shaft hub length diameter (b4) /mm ( d4) /mm

b Figure 6. Variations of design variables

(a)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22*

14.000 28.287 43.914 33.285 31.190 32.185 40.357 10.873 10.296 10.185 10.109 10.095 10.185 10.112 10.088 10.089 19.094 10.089 41.562 10.088 10.107 10.090

14.000 43.887 34.717 41.709 14.498 40.882 14.730 11.008 10.338 10.210 10.108 18.720 10.176 10.240 10.220 10.116 10.459 13.288 12.618 10.157 10.238 10.450

220.00 396.10 308.76 319.61 240.66 516.25 205.47 426.89 239.47 363.23 361.62 363.23 334.14 365.47 369.61 365.18 367.19 419.37 367.85 365.20 365.54 365.17

140.00 175.39 157.53 125.60 170.53 184.34 167.26 125.80 121.62 121.64 120.52 120.67 120.53 120.38 120.21 120.23 120.80 179.46 123.26 120.22 120.35 120.24

140.00 108.20 50.499 154.27 198.42 121.63 157.04 72.305 54.916 55.614 51.747 71.943 51.532 52.261 58.232 50.729 54.423 50.802 58.072 50.705 51.545 52.273

(b) Figure 7. Variations of state variables

Figure 8. A variation of total volume of the pulley

689

TABLE IV. OPTIMAL RESULTS OF STATE VARIABLES AND OBJECTIVE

VARIABLES

Iiterations

Shell of max radial Max deflection ofMax stress The total volume shaft/mm displacement/mm /MPa of pulley /mm3

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22*

0.37949 0.13734 0.16670 0.14390 0.21724 0.95210E-01 0.24663 0.34017 0.53029 0.43503 0.44548 0.34515 0.47006 0.43915 0.43169 0.44379 0.34395 0.27114 0.26911 0.44260 0.43985 0.43655

0.59844 0.13164 0.22648 0.15125 0.38215 0.85905E-01 0.45587 0.35888 0.83503 0.58384 0.60436 0.35491 0.67075 0.58808 0.57016 0.59819 0.52919 0.24786 0.40872 0.59512 0.58940 0.58051

73.443 45.099 40.330 36.179 51.869 22.097 61.225 64.651 93.576 78.453 82.831 61.777 83.946 78.983 77.663 82.498 75.707 45.631 71.227 82.303 81.912 78.335

0.46794E+08 0.87120E+08 0.96833E+08 0.84286E+08 0.82021E+08 0.10269E+09 0.91859E+08 0.43103E+08 0.34678E+08 0.37155E+08 0.36418E+08 0.39813E+08 0.35917E+08 0.36563E+08 0.37173E+08 0.36324E+08 0.51376E+08 0.50674E+08 0.85602E+08 0.36327E+08 0.36483E+08 0.36531E+08

Figure 12. Stress nephogram of optimized hub

C. Analysis of optimal results The best data are obtained and rounded. In such a case, the FEA of the pulley is made again. The maximum stress of the shell is 17.396MPa, as shown in Fig.9, which occurs in the welded position of shell and the spoke. The maximum stress of the shaft is 78.335MPa, as shown in Fig.10, which occurs in the restraint place of bearing. The maximum stress of the spoke is 59.939MPa, as shown in Fig.11; The maximum stress of hub is 20.876MPa, as shown in Fig.12, which occurs in the joint of hub and shaft. The stress of each component has increased, but all in allowable stress range. As shown in table5, the pulley volume decreases 21.93% compared with pre-optimization, the maximum deflection of the pulley shaft decreases 3%, while maximum stress increases 6.67%, the maximum radial displacement of the shell increases 15%. V. CONCLUSIONS Above results suggest that the optimal design based on ANSYS is a feasible way to improve the design. Through the optimal design of the pulley structure, the pulley volume decreases 21.93% compared with pre-optimization. The pulley structure is more reasonable. The research in the paper would benefit the enterprise to raise the quality of products.
TABLE V. COMPARISON OF THE OBJECTIVE VARIABLES AND THE STATE
VARIABLES

Figure 9.

Stress nephogram of optimized shell

Figure 10. Stress nephogram of optimized optimized shaft

Pre-Optimal Design Optimized design

max radial displacement of shell /mm

max deflection of shaft/mm

max stress /MPa

total volume3of pulley/mm

0.37949 0.43655

0.59844 0.58051

73.443 78.335

0.46794E+08 0.36531E+08

REFERENCES
[1] SONG Weigang. Design of genaral belt conveyor[M].Beijing machinery industry publishing house2006.165168. [2] CHEN Qinghua, PAN Dilin.FEA and optimal design of belt conveyor drive pulley [J]. coal mine machinery2004, (1):1213. [3] MA Xianting. Parameter calculating features of belt conveyor drive pulley [J]. coal technique,2004,23(3). [4] CAI Yongyan. Design and calculation of belt conveyor drive pulley [J]. sci-tech information,2007,(17):593+534. [5] WANG Jierong, CHEN Hongwei. Fracturing analysis and countermeasure of belt conveyor pulley [J]. hoisting and conveying machinery,2006,(5): 8485.

Figure 11. Stress nephogram of optimized spoke

690