Abstract
A preliminary study on a double-acting hydraulic cylinder subject to high-pressure loading conditions (pressure = 350 bar) and with a bore diameter of 300 mm is presented. The substitution of the reference steel cylinder tube with a multi-material tube is investigated. In detail, a solution providing a steel thin inner liner wrapped by carbon composite materials is analytically and numerically tested in terms of weight reduction. The composite lay-up design and the component geometry are built to comply with manufacturing constraints for a relatively high-volume production. The alternative multi-material cylinder is designed to ensure the same expected performance as its steel counterpart. Firstly, the non-conventional hydraulic cylinder was designed by extending Lamé’s solution to composite materials, by adopting the micro-mechanics theory of composites in order to bear the maximum operating pressure by monitoring its radial and axial deformation. The selection of the most appropriate carbon reinforcement was investigated. The influence of the stiffness-to-weight and the strength-to-weight ratio of the reinforcement on the design is discussed. Secondly, finite element analyses were performed to evaluate the occurrence of buckling and the modal response of the actuator considering the fluid and of the cylinder own weight influence. The results confirm the validity of the new cylinder tube design compared to the reference steel component. The proposed barrel weights 80 kg compared to the 407 kg of the reference cylinder, with a weight reduction of ~80%. Furthermore, it has a compact design with a decrease of the barrel outer diameter of ~5.3%.
Highlights
Weight reduction and fuel consumption optimization are challenging tasks during the design of vehicles [1,2], both in the automotive and in the handling machinery area
The design of a suitable composite material stacking sequence for the cylinder wall is discussed in the Section 5.1 with regards to the circumferentially active layers—i.e., the unidirectional plies whose fibres are orthogonally oriented with respect to the cylinder axis (90◦ plies, φ = 90◦ see in Figure 2); the sizing of the layers devoted to the support of the axial actions (0◦ plies, φ = 0◦ and the UD reinforcements are aligned with the cylinder axis, see in Figure 2) will be discussed in Section 5.2 below
The thickness of the steel liner is assumed infinitesimal in the pertinent structural calculations, and it inherits the circumferential and axial strain values from the composite layer it is bonded to, i.e., the Carbon Fibre Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) tube inner surface; those strains that are cyclic in nature due to the succession of loading
Summary
Weight reduction and fuel consumption optimization are challenging tasks during the design of vehicles [1,2], both in the automotive and in the handling machinery area. In [8,10], a methodology is presented for designing the cylinder tube and the rod in composites of a hydraulic actuator, and the analytical results and the experimental data are compared. As buckling and solution a multi-material design component adopts inner and thin-walled steelThe liner and a behaviorisare discussed comparing the original that solution andanthe composite replacement This solution is promising in terms of wear resistance solution is a multi-material design component that adopts an inner and thin-walled steel liner and a and reducing fatigue a result thesolution inner metallic liner. This is reducing fatigue as a result of the inner metallic liner
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