Structural Design and Optimization of an Underwater Skirt Pile Gripper

摘要

A hydraulic skirt pile gripper (the gripper or the pile gripper) is widely used in the installation and construction of offshore platforms, and it mainly plays the role of clamping pipe piles during the construction of the offshore platform for ensuring the subsequent grouting. The number of holes in the body of the pile gripper has a great influence on the force of the body. Finite element software was used to simulate the force of the body with different numbers of holes. Then, a suitable number of holes was selected according to the stress and strain of the body. At the same time, with a smaller diameter of the pile and a larger diameter of the hole, the diameter and the height of the gripper body had a significant effect on the stress-strain of the body. In this paper, the ANSYS software was used to establish a design model and optimization was conducted. The fuzzy matter-element method was used to select the optimal design. After optimization, the maximum equivalent stress of the body was reduced by 14.75% and the volume of the body was reduced by 4.8%. The optimization method in this paper is effective.