Bionic Design Method for Crane Box Girder Wind Load Reduction Based on Ostracion-Cubicus

The wind load is an important load during the gantry crane operation, and the crane box girder is the major windshield component. Therefore the wind load reduction design for the crane box girder can decrease the crane energy consumption effectively. The bionic design method for the crane box girder wind load reduction based on the geometry of ostracion-cubicus was explored. Firstly, the ostracion-cubicus mouth feature profile was extracted through gray level conversion, binary image conversion and edge detection method. On this basis, a bionic model was built with the box girder height as the design variable. Secondly, the bionic design of the traditional crane box girder was realized by attaching the light material to the windward side of the box girder. Finally, aerodynamic characteristics of the bionic box girder was evaluated with FLUENT. A 40 t container crane was taken as an evaluation case, and comparison was made between the original and the bionic ones, expanded polystyrene (EPS) was selected as the attachment material. The research shows that the wind load decreases by 65.77% with the bionic girder, while the weigh is only 2.28% more than the original one. The flow field disturbance from the boundary layer separation reduces due to the streamlined structure of the bionic girder, which decreases the lift pulsation, improves the running stability of the crane in the wind field. © 2020, Editorial Department of Journal of Southwest Jiaotong University. All right reserved.