Enhancing fatigue life of cylinder-crown integrated structure by optimizing dimension

Cylinder-crown integrated hydraulic press (CCIHP) is a new press structure. The hemispherical hydraulic cylinder also functions as a main portion of crown, which has lower weight and higher section modulus compared with the conventional hydraulic cylinder and press crown. As a result, the material strength capacity is better utilized. During the engineering design of cylinder-crown integrated structure, in order to increase the fatigue life, structural optimization on the basis of the adaptive macro genetic algorithms (AMGA) is first conducted to both reduce weight and decrease peak stress. It is shown that the magnitude of the maximum principal stress is decreased by 28.6%, and simultaneously the total weight is reduced by 4.4%. Subsequently, strain-controlled fatigue test is carried out, and the stress-strain hysteresis loops and cyclic hardening curve are obtained. Based on linear fit, the fatigue properties are calculated and used for the fatigue life prediction. It is shown that the predicted fatigue life is significantly increased from 157000 to 1070000 cycles after structural optimization. Finally, according to the optimization design, a 6300 kN CCIHP has been manufactured, and priority application has been also suggested.