There is no commercial software that will give you the necessary methods and procedures to qualify the strain-energy equations for the rubber, fabric or steel cords and their aggregates.

No one has published the intellectual properties necessary. I doubt anyone will due to the proprietary and costly procedures that have been developed at significant expense over many years.

No one will tell you what laboratory machines you need to have, and how to use them to obtain the parameters for the FEA strain-energy models.

Special jigs and fixtures will be required for these special machines such as the biaxial or triaxial strain pattern and parameters over the expected strain rate and magnitude.

Many of the measurements will be non-linear and orthotropic.

FEA is not enough. You need to test the results. How will you do this?

We do FEA on all forms of splices. We have designed, built, and tested steel cord splices to ST-9000 N/mm and are continuing the expansion of the work beyond.

Even if you could do the above, you will still need further expertise, which is again proprietary. Ask any belt manufacturer.

I do wish you well, but I believe you will suffer futility in attempting to build such a system without more than any publication or commercial code can give.

We have published a fair bit on steel cord splice design concepts with some results in Bulk Solid Handling, Society of Mining Engineers (USA), ANSYS seminars at their annual meeting and headquarters to demonstrate the art. See our website for the publications and some details at: www.conveyor-dynamics.com.

We have consulted to the belt manufacturing companies to demonstrate techniques on the above along with splice designs that have been adopted, fatigue cycle tested and built replacing the standards of DIN for 2,3,4 and 5 steps of steel cord splices. These include 2 steps at ST-5100N/mm.

We designed, built and tested, many belts, on the world’s largest splice dynamic fatigue testing machine capable of belt ratings to ST-10,000 N/mm. ■

Hi Mr. Nordell,

Can the 3D FEA model of the splice be runned in a conventional computer? Or it can only run in a cluster system? What would be the configuration for the computer to run this Splice FEA analysis? ■

Originally Posted by caiobertholdi

Hi Mr. Nordell,

Can the 3D FEA model of the splice be runned in a conventional computer? Or it can only run in a cluster system? What would be the configuration for the computer to run this Splice FEA analysis?

Yes, we do have ANSYS running on Window's based single CPU as well as multiple CPU's. You will need to develop the constitutive properties of rubber, fabric and steel cords. In addition, you will need to develop the orthotropic properties of the composite belt bending stiffness in 3-D. The later bend properties are gleaned from laboratory tests of the final belt construction.

We have good success mimicking our new splice testing machine, designed and built for Double Arrow, which can evaluate to ST-15,000 N/mm (3000 kN piston force). Old machine sold to Goodyear/ContiTech was rated for and successfully tested at ST-10,000 N/mm.

Good Luck

Larry ■