Stress analysis and design of cylinder bearings supporting metal bridges

Andrew Ch. Yiannopoulos

The present work presents a method for dimensioning solid cylinders supporting metal bridges at the side of the stationary hinge, which is known as cylinder bearing. The hinge constitutes of two plates with curved surfaces in contact with a cylinder between them. The imposed forces on the hinge cause contact pressures distributed on two antisymmetric circular arcs. If the arcs are too large, the Hertz theory can not be used for the calculation of stresses because it gives no sufficient results. For this particular problem an exact solution is given for normal and shearing stresses on the whole cylinder cross section. The octahedral shearing stress is used as a criterion to express the strength of the cylinder according to the maximum distortion energy theory, because it offers a more reliable tool to estimate the strength of the cylinder material. Moreover, a design equation is derived which may be useful to engineers, if they have to calculate the cylinder dimensions. The results show that the cylinder dimensions should be higher than estimated by other designers.

https://dx.doi.org/10.31873/IJEAS.5.5.07