Braking performance of working rail-mounted cranes under wind load

Rail-mounted cranes can be easily damaged by a sudden gust of wind while working at a running speed, due to the large mass and high barycenter positions. In current designs, working rail-mounted cranes mainly depend on wheel braking torques to resist large wind load. Regular brakes, however, cannot satisfactorily stop the crane, which induces safety issues of cranes and hence leads to frequent crane accidents, especially in sudden gusts of wind. Therefore, it is necessary and important to study the braking performance of working rail mounted cranes under wind load. In this study, a simplified mechanical model was built to simulate the working rail mounted gantry crane, and dynamic analysis of the model was carried out to deduce braking performance equations that reflect the qualitative relations among braking time, braking distance, wind load, and braking torque. It was shown that, under constant braking torque, there existed inflection points on the curves of braking time and distance versus windforce. Both the braking time and the distance increased sharply when wind load exceeded the inflection point value, referred to as the threshold windforce. The braking performance of a 300 ton shipbuilding gantry crane was modeled and analyzed using multibody dynamics software ADAMS. The simulation results were fitted by quadratic curves to show the changes of braking time and distance versus windforce under various mount of braking torques. The threshold windforce could be obtained theoretically by taking derivative of fitted curves. Based on the fitted functional relationship between threshold windforce and braking torque, theoretical basis are provided to ensure a safe and rational design for crane wind-resistant braking systems