Our engineering team does not necessarily reinvent the wheel, but we innovate at times on rings. It’s not uncommon to increase performance specs or capacity within manufacturing or materials handling environments based on new engineering customer requirements.
In one of our jobs, we had previously designed and certified a lifting weldment similar to the image above. One of our jobs was to provide a stamped engineering report along with fabrication drawings for a higher capacity load for the lifting weldment.
The first design moved rolled rings Ø15′-6″ x 6′ long, 3/16″ thick, weighing ~ 2200 pounds each!
The revised weldment needed to accommodate 10 foot long rings up to 8,000 pounds with the same diameter.
We started with the initial design in place as a starting basis, and we sought to increase strength where it made sense from our design constraints. In the meantime, we sought to maintain the weldment weight.
In our engineering analysis and design, below-the-hook codes were used to maintain proper safety factors on critical design areas and overall stresses. We paid attention to weldment stability and considered loaded and unloaded states to reduce swinging motions in order to keep carrying loads level.
The engineering, modeling and analysis were done based on the manufacturing environment requirements and optimizing around the requirements for efficiency and safety.
Our engineering workflow has a lot of considerations and working with constraints to increase performance is a common problem we solve with creativity and experience.