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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Figure 6: Daily fatigue damage of one weld of Crane-AM.

These results are available in the dashboard as a full interactive 3D model of the main steel structure of the crane. The user can rotate, pan, tilt, and zoom the 3D model to zoom in on certain parts of the crane. An example of the resulting accumulated fatigue damage D of the crane is illustrated in Figure 7. The left part of the figure illustrates the model of the crane with all 1298 welds that are being tracked as blue lines. Each weld contains multiple evaluation points along their length. For each of them the accumulated damage is being tracked. This allows the user not only to identify critical welds, but also to pinpoint specific critical locations on these welds. A section view of the main girder is plotted at the right of Figure 7 to illustrate this. In the section view shown on the right in Figure 7, the location with the highest accumulated damage is situated in the upper left corner of the box girder underneath the trolley rail. This is a well-known fatigue critical location. Also the ends of the diaphragms near the bottom plate of the box girder are locations that show high accumulated damage. Finally, the corners of the stiffener plates welded at the inside of the diaphragm show damage accumulation. Special attention should be paid to all these listed locations during periodic inspections of the crane. The advantage of the SHM system is that it allows ranking the identified critical locations based on expected remaining lifetime and define appropriate inspection intervals. Even before cracks are found it can be considered to perform weld improvement techniques such as HFMI as a preventive measure. This way, the SHM system allows identifying critical locations that were not considered during the crane design. The actual loading that occurs during the service life of the crane will always be more complex than the simplified load cases that are taken into account at the design stage. By taking into account the measured loading conditions accurate fatigue life predictions can be made.

Figure 7: Interactive 3D digital twin model showing the accumulated fatigue damage for all the welds (the location of the section view is highlighted by the red box in the figure on the left).