Wire Rope Isolators for the Vibration Protection of Heavy Equipment: Exploratory Research

Leblouba, Moussa, Balaji, Palani Selvaraj and Rahman, Muhammad (2022) Wire Rope Isolators for the Vibration Protection of Heavy Equipment: Exploratory Research. Buildings, 12 (12). p. 2212. ISSN 2075-5309

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings12122212

Abstract

Wire rope isolators (WRI) are devices that dissipate vibrational energy. They are used in various industrial applications to protect equipment and machinery. Heavy machinery and limited space are still some of the constraints engineers face when designing the WRI system. Heavy equipment requires increased vertical stiffness; however, using larger WRIs decreases their lateral flexibility, which is the target property in the first place. Using several small-sized WRIs is not possible in the case of limited space. Therefore, the present study proposes two improvements to WRIs to overcome the challenges caused by heavy-weight equipment and a lack of the space required to insert the appropriate number and size of WRIs. Two new configurations for WRIs are proposed, Spring-WRI (S-WRI) and Double-WRI (D-WRI), to improve the stiffness and damping properties in order to expand their applications. Monotonic and quasi-static cyclic loading tests were performed on the conventional and proposed WRI variants. Exploratory tests showed that the WRI’s stiffness greatly depends on the wire rope diameter. Adding springs inside a conventional WRI (S-WRI) can improve vertical stiffness while maintaining the required lateral flexibility. The D-WRI was found to preserve the necessary flexibility and to be capable of solving the problem of limited space. The hysteresis behavior of the D-WRI can be expressed as the sum of the hysteresis of each WRI. The proposed configurations effectively improve the stiffness and damping properties of WRIs and expand their applicability for the vibration isolation of heavy equipment and in limited space.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Funding information: This paper is based upon work supported by the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE), Malaysia, under the ERGS grant scheme. The University of Sharjah provided partial support.
Uncontrolled Keywords: cyclic test, wire rope isolator, improved isolator, vibration, stiffness, damping, monotonic loading
Subjects: H100 General Engineering
H300 Mechanical Engineering
Department: Faculties > Engineering and Environment > Mechanical and Construction Engineering
Depositing User: Rachel Branson
Date Deposited: 13 Dec 2022 12:54
Last Modified: 13 Dec 2022 13:00
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/50876

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