Design and Analysis of Loader Attachment of 13 Tonne Excavator for Tunneling

Excavators are heavy construction equipment consisting of a boom, arm, bucket and cabin on a rotating platform. All movement and functions of a hydraulic excavator are accomplished through the use of hydraulic fluid, with Hydraulic cylinders and Hydraulic motors. The excavator movement is actuated by an undercarriage with huge rubber tires or by means of a crawler track. In today's ever growing pace, construction operations, such as digging, ground leveling, carrying loads, dumping loads and straight traction play a very significant role and hydraulic excavators are needed to reduce manpower and complete the job in stipulated time more efficiently. Excavators provide solutions for handling materials within the confined areas of a tunnel. Purpose of tunneling may be for pedestrian walking, motor driving, rail travelling or even for making a path for water or oil transport through canal. In addition to this few tunnels are used for routing optic cables for signal transmission or cables for transmitting power or in some case used as sewers to transmit waste. The effective use of expensive construction machines has made it necessary to improve the performance characteristics of machines such as operating reach parameters and fault free operation within a tunnel. All these require for the study of the kinematics of the specified construction equipment. The project is carried out with respect to an existing 13 Ton class excavator manufactured by L&T - KOMATSU Limited, Bangalore. The kinematics of the excavator needs to be altered suitably so that it can work within the tunnel of 5 meter dimension (customer requirement). The aim of the project is to study the kinematic reach and forces developed, create a conceptual design, modeling using CATIA and Pro/Engineer and the analysis of the design using ANSYS.