Design of aluminium boom and arm for an excavator

Abstract The aim of this work is to study the boom and the arm of an excavator in order to replace the material, which they are usually made of, with another material. In particular, the study wants to substitute the steel alloy for an aluminium alloy. This change lightens the components of the arm, allows to increase the load capacity of the bucket and so it is possible to increase the excavator productivity per hour. For this purpose many different load conditions have been studied numerically on the original excavator in order to estimate a safety factor and the deformability or flexibility of each component. These parameters have been used in order to design a new arm. The excavator which has been analyzed is composed of three elements and the load conditions assumed, in order to evaluate the stress, are five (lifting at the maximum and minimum distance from the axis of rotation, maximum load induced by hydraulic cylinders, spin of the arm of the excavator and collision with an obstacle, etc.). As regards to the safety factor and deformability in order to maintain the original value the new geometry of the arm involves an increase of the dimension and so the lightness is not correlate only to the variation of the material density. The weight of the final geometry of the aluminium arm is 1080 kg whereas the one of the steel arm is 2050 kg and consequently it has been possible to increase the capacity of bucket from 1 m 3 to the 1.35 m 3 . With reference to the manufacturing cycle of the aluminium arm with the new pins, the price increased about € 2.500–3.000 and this aspect could be justified if we consider that the productivity per hour increased about 35%.