Mill Building Design
One of our clients asked us to determine if the lateral stiffness of a series three (3) 60 year old mill buildings with step columns was adequate to prevent the cranes from inducing a large building side sway. Some of the columns were 2 step and some were 3 step columns since the crane runways were at different elevations. SDC is working on development of algorithms to perform a 3-step column analysis. The column analysis will include linear and rotational springs to model in the effects of building flexibility. Our goal is to determine the effects of building flexibility in crane runway repair and design.
Crane Girder Vibration
One of our clients was experiencing excessive crane girder vibration as shown in the attached video. The girder vibration is due to mechanical resonance between the crane and crane girder. The problem was corrected by adding mass to the EOT crane as a damping measure. Our goal is to generate an algorithm to calculate the natural frequency of cranes and crane girders.