Design, analysis and manufacturing of lifting apparatus for wind turbine tower assembly

Nowadays, lifting and conveying are quite important for work machines. As one of the lifting-conveying machines, cranes and their apparatus are used in all fields where loading and unloading takes place, such as port services and transportation. In this study, a safe lifting apparatus was designed for specific manufacturing. 1 orientation apparatus is mounted on the base flange of the tower, 2 main lifting apparatus facing each other were mounted on the ceiling flange of the tower, and 1 tower was mounted with 1 mobile crane. The apparatus was designed with the SolidWorks package program used in 3D solid model design. The material quality of the apparatus used was St52-3. Finite element analysis of the design created in the SolidWorks program was carried out with Ansys package program. The apparatus consists of a welded combination of 2 parts. Finite element thickness of the lower and upper parts of the orientation and main lifting apparatus was determined as 10 mm, the finite element thickness of the welds was 3 mm. 60-70-80-90 mm and 5-10-15-20 mm welding thicknesses were investigated in each analysis as the limit condition. The design was assembled from the bore centers and 150 kN was applied to the guiding apparatus and 500 kN was applied to the main lifting apparatus. Safety designs were determined according to the yield strength of 355 MPa, and the analyses were classified as safe and unsafe. The designed apparatuses were optimized to be assembled from bore centers with reference to the flanges of the towers. After the manufacturing, magnetic particle tests were performed and reported according to TS EN 17638/TS EN 23278 standards as one of the non-destructive testing methods.