Crusher for carbon anodes.

 

This is a 400-ton press employed in aluminum production for breaking carbon anodes after their cycle of life.

The working load of the press is 150,000 cycles per year. The rear girder of the original structure has been subject to relatively frequent cases of fatigue cracks and it was decided to replace this component with a new one realized with different criteria. The finite element model was composed of five substructures with a total of 50,000 solid and shell elements, 80,000 nodes and over 200,000 degrees of freedom.