Structural Dynamics and a Virtual Prototype Simulator of the HAB System for Oil Sands Production

Abstract

Crude oil and gas are strategic commodities for U.S. national energy security. The demand for fossil fuel energy will continue to grow amid dwindling global supply. Other energy sources, such as oil sands and heavy oil production, are expected to provide a significant portion of the anticipated shortfall with diversity. The drive towards economic oil sands recovery has become a focal point in the pursuit of low-cost, bulk production methods for competitive oil sands production. The hopper-attached belt-wagon (HAB) system is one of the potential economic haulage systems being pursued towards this strategic goal. The use of this technology will introduce unique dynamic, design, and implementation problems that must be articulated, modeled, and solved via advanced research. The HAB system kinematics and dynamics have been modeled as a planar mechanism of six-bar linkages using the Newton-Euler formulation. A virtual HAB prototype model has been developed and simulated in the automatic dynamic analysis of mechanical systems software environment. The computational simulation results show that the required joint torques vectors vary with time and the HAB system has good operating characteristics. The main novelty of this research is the application of the Newton-Euler-Kutzbach formulation and virtual engineering for creating efficient equipment-formation models toward economic haulage of materials.