Abstract

Mobile hydraulic applications are exposed to changing environmental conditions and working processes. Furthermore, the fact that those systems consist of mechanical, fluid power and electronic control parts, make the design phase of the product to become complex. In a product development process, system configurations, components selections and parameter optimization must be accomplished in an evaluation-iteration method until fulfilling the performance specification. Replacing real physical prototypes by mathematical models and virtual prototyping in the design process is a major benefit in terms of reducing costs and time in the design phase. This paper introduces a modular method that generates dynamic models for a mobile hydraulic crane and a 3D graphical interface for visualizing of the simulation results in realtime. From the visual feedback provided by the interface, the user interacts with the course of the simulation by driving the crane model with joystick controllers. Such a tool is ideal to be utilised in virtual prototyping, since user can virtually drive and test the prototype and evaluate the system behaviour in realtime. The simulator also allows the user to instantly modify parameters and components of the model. A two degree of freedom hydraulically-driven crane is studied as an example.

Keywords: mobile crane, hydraulics-mechanics coupling, virtual reality, interface, real-time simulation, numerical solvers