DESIGN AND FABRICATION OF PILE CAGE WELDING MACHINE

Abstract

With the perpetual increment in volume of infrastructure development across the globe, the need for creation of efficient and cost effective ways of optimization of construction procedures has become inevitable. Specifically, after the initiation of One Belt One Road initiative and the China Pakistan Economic Corridor project, the need of efficient construction methods has become relevant for Pakistan and the South Asian region. Piling forms the backbone of the construction practices with an enormous amount of human resource, capital and time being invested in formation of pile cages and their drilling into the soil. The economics of infrastructure industry is therefore highly impacted by the efficiency of this process. Hence it remains to be an area of significant improvement for the engineers and developers. Currently, this pile cage formation process is done by laborers expending a huge amount of energy and time in this process. This project aims to develop Pakistan’s first prototype of a full-scale pile cage welding machine. The project includes analytical and CAD design of pile cage welding machine, simulation of critical components on FEA software, fabrication of machine and final testing of machine and the cages produced for further improvement in quality of the cages produced and their usage in the industry. The literature review section includes the references for the similar work done earlier, the basis of design and calculations and motivation for the need of developing this machine. The methodology section breaks down the product into its various components and then discussed the design procedure for each one of them. The simulation results in FEA software are shown in the conclusion section of the report. The report also highlights the need of development of this machine by considering the economic analysis of the machine. The cost benefit analysis strengthens the need of product development. The expected results and conclusions of the project are also discussed and further improvements are suggested where needed. The report is designed so as to give the reader an insight into the work done besides making them aware of the work done in past regarding this product and in the related industry. The possibilities of further attachments and additions to the product are also discussed in the results section of the rep