PSI - Issue 75

Jeroen Van Wittenberghe et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 75 (2025) 111–119 Jeroen VAN WITTENBERGHE and Vitor ADRIANO / Structural Integrity Procedia (2025)

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1. Introduction Overhead cranes are crucial for steel plants, which may have hundreds of cranes across many kilometres of runway girders. These cranes face cyclic loads leading to fatigue and damage, making safe operation essential. Regular inspections and maintenance are required, though they only provide a snapshot of the crane's condition. The largest cranes in steel plants, used for casting and steelmaking, typically have capacities between 200 and 500 tons. Crane accidents and incidents can have a severe impact on the overall production and performance of a steel plant. In the Ugitech steel plant at Ugine in France, a ladle crane collapsed on 3rd January 2022 [1]. One steel worker was killed during the collapse. The repair and replacement of the crane and supporting infrastructure took several months. Steel production stopped for a certain time, and was heavily impacted. In June 2022, steel production was still limited to 60%. Full crane operation was only restored in the first quarter of 2023. Hence the reliability of such large welded industrial cranes is crucial for safety and efficiency. As these structures face varied conditions, effective structural health monitoring (SHM) is necessary. This paper presents results obtained by a SHM approach for overhead cranes that was described by the authors in [2], focusing on early detection of fatigue damage and proactive maintenance to ensure long-term performance and prevent failures.

Nomenclature FBG

fibre bragg grating

FEA finite element analysis ROM reduced order model SCADA supervisory control and data acquisition SHM structural health monitoring

2. Digital twin SHM of cranes 2.1. Overview of the cranes

In this paper the results of digital twin based structural health monitoring systems of two cranes are used. The cranes are shown in Figure 1. The crane on the left is a 12.5 ton single box girder crane with a span width of 18 m, located in the testing facilities of OCAS (will be called Crane-OCAS in the rest of this paper). The crane on the right is a large capacity casting crane at one of the production sites of ArcelorMittal (Crane-AM) and has a span width of 30 m.

Figure 1: (left) Single girder crane Crane-OCAS; (right) large capacity casting crane Crane-AM.

To generate the digital twin models, both cranes are analysed using finite element analysis (FEA) in the software package Abaqus 2023. A linear-elastic FEA model is created based on 3-dimensional design drawings of the cranes. It mainly comprises shell elements. Mesh sizes are based on the fine mesh zone requirements according to the guidelines of DNVGL-CG-0127 [3]. Shell thicknesses are assigned based on the plate thickness of the crane structure.