Maha Crane

Hello everyone.  My project has switched gears recently.  Originally, I was working on analyzing the load holding valves on the hydraulic crane installed at Maha.  I was able to run tests on the valves that came with the crane and would represent that technology that is currently in the field.  The next step is to replace the valves with new, state of the art valves that were donated to us and run the same tests.  In this way, I could quantify how energy efficient/inefficient the current valves are and how much could be saved with new valves and a closed loop controller.  Recently though, I've been working on improving the simulation for the crane.  Specifically, I'm working on improving the kinematic model.  To do that, I've made the entire crane in Solidworks and then imported the model into MATLAB's SimMechanics.  The current challenge is getting SimMechanics to talk to AMESim (where the fluid model was made), so we can simulate the entire system.  The goal is to validate this model so in the future, they can more easily test different control techniques.