Material optimization and Modal Analysis of Elevator bucket

Abstract

A Bucket Elevator is a material handling equipment. It can elevate variety of bulk materials from light to heavy and
from fine to large lumps. It consists of endless chain drive & on which metallic buckets are fixed. Bucket elevators
always faces problem during buildup loads. In order to overcome this problem high capacity bucket is to be designed
which will carry higher loads. This can achieve by using different materials. As new materials are developed and
quality materials become more readily available, then changes in design have been made to adapt to these materials.
Different iterations will be carried out to serve the best material. Also, bucket elevators often experience certain
vibration while carrying a material. So the modal analysis will be done to find its natural frequency. For this a 3D
model of bucket of elevator will be modeled in CATIAV5, meshing will be carried out in HYPERMESH, and ANSYS will
be used for post processing. Based on results material optimization will be carried out and through re-iteration best
material will be suggested. Results obtained from numerical method will be validated with the experimental results.