A Co-Simulation Approach for Hydraulic Percussion Units

Sammanfattning: This Licentiate of Engineering thesis concerns modelling and simulation of hydraulic percussion units. These units are often found in equipment for breaking or drilling in rock and concrete, and are also often driven by oil hydraulics, in which complex fluid-structure couplings are essential for their operation.Current methodologies used today when developing hydraulic percussion units are based on decoupled analyses, which are not correctly capturing the important coupled mechanisms. Hence, an efficient method for coupled simulations is of high importance, since these mechanisms are critical for the function of these units. Therefore, a co-simulation approach between a 1D system simulation model representing the fluid system and a structural 3D FE-model is proposed.This approach is presented in detail, implemented for two well-known simulation tools and evaluated for a simple but relevant model. The Hopsan simulation tool was used for the fluid system and the FE-simulation software LS-DYNA was used for the structural mechanics simulation. The co-simulation interface was implemented using the Functional Mock-up Interface-standard.The approach was further developed to also incorporate multiple components for coupled simulations. This was considered necessary when models for the real application are to be developed. The use of two components for co-simulation was successfully evaluated for two models, one using the simple rigid body representation, and a second where linear elastic representations of the structural material were implemented.An experimental validation of the co-simulation approach applied to an existing hydraulic hammer was performed. Experiments on the hydraulic hammer were performed using an in-house test rig, and responses were registered at four different running conditions. The co-simulation model was developed using the same approach as before. The corresponding running conditions were simulated and the responses were successfully validated against the experiments. A parameter study was also performed involving two design parameters with the objective to evaluate the effects of a parameter change.This thesis consists of two parts, where Part I gives an introduction to the application, the simulation method and the implementation, while Part II consists of three papers from this project.