Challenges

In designing a smaller “climbing” crane that would take up less ground space and require just one truck to move to the next installation site, Liftra engineers needed to be able to ensure that the tower elements would not be crushed by the applied climbing forces, including the load on the tower and flanges, and the gripping forces.

Solution

Liftra engineers ran finite element structural simulations both in Ansys Cloud and on their own workstations to perform static simulations. They ran both linear material models and nonlinear material models for elastic/plastic analysis of the towers to determine whether the crane would cause any permanent deformation to the tower, and, if so, how much. Using Ansys Cloud, the simulation was completed in 1 hour versus 5 hours on company workstations — a speed-up of 5X.