Optimizing Heavy Equipment for Handling Bulk Materials with Adams-EDEM Co-simulation

Abstract

When designing heavy equipment such as dragline buckets, backhoe loaders and excavators, Multi-Body Dynamics (MBD) tools such as MSC Adams are commonly used to study how loads and forces are distributed throughout mechanical systems and how they impact on the dynamics of moving parts. Bulk materials such as clays, soils, mined ores, gravel or rocks, are complex in their behavior and the interaction with equipment is difficult to predict. Understanding how a design will perform in a particular material environment is critical to ensuring an optimal design that combines strength and durability, with performance efficiency. EDEM—the leading Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) simulation software—realistically simulates the behavior of even the most challenging bulk materials and provides a high-fidelity representation of the loads and forces acting on equipment. By combining EDEM with Adams in a co-simulation environment, engineers are able to realistically model the motion of equipment as it interacts with a bulk material and examine how material loads are transferred throughout their mechanical system.