An analytical approach to evaluate the maximum load carrying capacity for pin-mounted telescopic hydraulic cylinder

Abstract

The hydraulic cylinder is an actuating mechanical maneuver used to transfer the power from one station to another. For industrial purposes, various types of cylinders are employed as per the requirement. Telescopic hydraulic cylinder, also known as the two-stage hydraulic cylinder is one of the widely used hydraulic cylinders in the industry. The closed center length of a telescopic cylinder is 20% to 40% of the open center length depending on the number of stages. The safe operation of such telescopic hydraulic cylinder is highly essential. One of the prominent failures includes the buckling failure of the hydraulic cylinder. Once the system fails, the operating parameters change abruptly and thus the proper working gets affected. In literature, there is no significant standard that governs the buckling load determination of two-stage hydraulic cylinder. Existing technical standard ISO/TS 13725 : 2016 approach is only prescribed for the single-stage cylinder. In this manuscript, the emphasis is kept upon the determination of the buckling load for the two-stage pin-mounted telescopic hydraulic cylinder. The buckling governing equation has been derived to obtain the buckling load using an analytical approach. Additionally, the stress condition of cylinder barrels of different stages has been discussed per thick cylinder theory. The finite element analysis has been performed for various dimensions of the hydraulic cylinder. The results obtained from analytical results show close vicinity with the finite element results. © IMechE 2020.