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Indexed by:Journal Papers

Date of Publication:2015-12-01

Journal:JOURNAL OF CONSTRUCTIONAL STEEL RESEARCH

Included Journals:SCIE、EI、Scopus

Volume:115

Page Number:206-222

ISSN No.:0143-974X

Key Words:Crawler crane; Lattice-boom structure; Geometrical nonlinear elastic instability; Co-rotational substructure element; Movable boundary; Multiple loading conditions

Abstract:This paper analyzes the geometrical nonlinear elastic instability for slender lattice-boom structures of crawler cranes. To reduce the dimension of equilibrium equations, the slender lattice-boom structure is divided into several substructures and an element-independent co-rotational substructure element is formulated. Including the discretization of gravity, a static condensation procedure for the co-rotational substructure element is implemented. In consideration of movable boundaries of the lattice-boom structure, the tensile forces of luffing cables related to the guyed mast rotation are given for the equilibrium equations. After that, accurate tangent stiffness matrices are formulated by taking the derivative of the generalized nodal forces with respect to the structural displacements and the guyed mast angle. To improve the computational efficiency of instability analysis under multiple loading conditions, a new method for identifying the instability loads of the slender lattice-boom structures is presented, based on the equilibrium equations in rate form. Two numerical examples show the availability and efficiency of the method. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.