Design and Stress Analysis of Excavator Arm and Bucket

Earthmoving machines is now a part of industry and construction fields these days. Excavators are the mobile machines that are moved by means of either crawler track or rubber-tired undercarriage. Function of excavator is to dig, dump, swing and elevate material by its mechanisms. Multibody simulation in motion views facilitates system level kinematic and dynamic analysis of whole excavator, making it possible to study the reaction forces and stress variation in every component of system. Dynamic behaviour of loading conditions are required to take account the effect of stress and vibration. In multibody dynamic analysis we are concern with dynamics of multibody interconnected multiple rigid bodies. The objective is to simulate the entire working cycle which consist of digging swinging dumping and swinging back to initial position. Study of stresses developed in various components is very much important in load lifting devices, which cause seal failure and reduction of fatigue life of cylinders. In this paper, a 30-ton hydraulic excavator is used for this particular study. Final outputs desired are the reaction forces at all joints and to evaluate the stresses at all gauge location. Modal analysis of excavator arm lifting mechanism was carried out in ANSYS. Excavator arm of different composite materials can be made out like steel, aluminium, alloy, structural steel etc. Analysis by using ANSYS 14.0 the result obtained that structural steel is preferred as good material for designing of excavator arm.