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The Automated Catalog: An Expert Database System
Published in Don Potter, Manton Matthews, Moonis Ali, Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, 2020
Q. Dong, W.D. Potter, D.E. Nute, L.W. Hill
Product selection can be very difficult as the product variety and options increase. Incorrect product selection not only results in waste of time and resources, but could cause serious personal injury and property damage. This is especially true in the case of safety product selection. Making a smart purchasing decision is far more complex than browsing pictures and text in a catalog. It usually requires careful consideration of several technical parameters, and help from experienced professionals. For example, to select casters, the customer has to bear in mind factors such as loading capacities, floor conditions, motive power, floor saving, noise, temperature, and chemical resistance. The typical customers are people who are broadly familiar with the product’s area, but lack specific knowledge and experience to make the correct selection.
Material Handling Systems
Published in Susmita Bandyopadhyay, Production and Operations Analysis, 2019
Casters and wheels are other types of material handling devices. Caster is a device with wheel to reach at the desired destination. Casters are generally used for pickup and drop off tasks. The wheel bearings of the caster can be of various types such as roller bearing, precision tapered bearing, precision sealed ball bearing, annular ball bearing, delrin bearing, bronze bearing, plain and sleeve bearing, spanned integrated precision sealed ball bearing, and Torrington-style roller bearing. Casters (Figure 14.7) can be swivel caster that is flexible enough to swivel or rotate in 360° direction or rigid or stationary caster with wheel mounted on a stationary fork. There are various types of swivel casters—locking caster, kingpin-less caster, hollow kingpin caster, plate caster, stem caster.
Garment-on-Hanger Order-Fulfillment Operations
Published in David E. Mulcahy, John P. Dieltz, Order-Fulfillment and Across-the-Dock Concepts, Design, and Operations Handbook, 2003
David E. Mulcahy, John P. Dieltz
The second caster variable is the caster type. Casters can be rigid or swivel. Rigid casters serve to hold the wheel in a fixed direction and permit a cart to turn at the end of an aisle or at corners. A swivel caster permits the wheel to rotate in all directions. This makes the cart easy to maneuver and to align at a workstation. With most manual GOH push carts, swivel casters are located in the front and rigid casters in the rear. A Z-frame cart has swivel casters on all four wheels.
Self-steering performance of a new bogie with four independently rotating wheels using caster angle
Published in International Journal of Rail Transportation, 2023
Chao Yang, Ning Xu, Wenjing Wang, Wen Li, Zunsong Ren
A new design is proposed to obtain the self-steering ability for a new bogie with four independently rotating wheels. It is achieved by using caster angles and a reasonable construction. The self-steering principle derives from the Macpherson strut suspension system in the automobile. The yaw moment generated by the lateral wheel-rail force and the caster angle is helpful to the steering performance. The new bogie contains two wheel-pairs which are central symmetry. The tops of the four steering axes are outward in the travel direction. The guiding performances of the new bogie are studied on straight and curved tracks. The dynamic system of the new bogie is asymptotically stable according to the eigenvalue analysis. The caster angle has great effects on the lateral responses of independent wheels. The new bogie with caster angles oscillates in the lateral direction whilst the IRW bogie without caster angles is drifted to one side on the straight track. The hunting motion of the new bogie is observed in simulations. The new bogie can correct the direction of motion and go back to the track centerline automatically. It has self-centring ability on straight tracks. The increasing caster angle can slightly reduce the angle of attack for the new bogie. On the contrary, the angle of attack of the left front wheel distinctly decreases with the decreasing anti-yaw stiffness. The new bogie is endowed with mild self-steering ability on curved tracks if the caster angle and anti-yaw stiffness are appropriate. A scale testing is conducted to confirm the hunting phenomenon. The experiment result of the scaled prototype indicates that the hunting phenomenon observed in simulations is believable. The steering concept using caster angles is feasible in the running gear with independent wheels.
Efficient modelling and optimization for double wishbone suspensions based on a non-adaptive sampling sparse response surface
Published in Engineering Optimization, 2019
Pu Li, Yunbao Huang, Haiyan Li, Kefeng Wang, Nan Xia, Haitian Yang
Two hardpoints that have large influences on the four objective parameters are chosen as design variables: the rear inner hardpoint of the Upper Control Arm (UCA, Point A in Figure 1) and the rear inner hardpoint of the Lower Control Arm (LCA, Point B in Figure 1). As their x-directional coordinates have little influence on the objective parameters, only the y- and z-directional coordinates are selected as the design variables. Thus, the relevant design vector is denoted as . The initial values of the design variables are set as mm, and the ranges of the design variables are set as 60 mm in terms of the initial values (Wu et al. 2014), the lower and upper bounds of the design vector are denoted as and . Finally, the optimization problem of the DWB suspension is defined as in Table 1. , , , in Table 1 are the functions of camber angle, caster angle, kingpin inclination angle and toe angle, respectively, with respect to the design variables and wheel travel. , , and represent the variations of camber angle, the caster angle, the kingpin inclination angle and the minimum toe angle, respectively, and they are considered as the four objective parameters. In this article, the optimized ultimate goal is defined as minimizing the sum of the camber angle and the kingpin inclination angle, and their weighting coefficients , are both set to one, indicating two equally weighted individual objectives.