Can FEA can help steel fabrications lose weight AND get stronger at the same time?
We've been working with DRA Group's Construct Engineering to help them build a bigger crane.
As you could imagine, the boom is a pretty critical part of the crane.
FEA showed that the initial design carried some high local stresses near joints and welds.
These are the sort of stresses you can't find with beam analysis packages like SPACE GASS.
As you can see in the image, we managed to significantly reduce the local stresses.
But the best part was losing about 400kg from the boom, which meant keeping the axle loads under the road going limit.
We think that's pretty useful for a mobile crane.
