Mechanical Analysis of a Scraping Method to Remove Attached Barnacles

Abstract

In order to clean the marine fouling attached to marine steel piles, a scraping method is proposed in this paper. Barnacles were used to represent a typical object needing removal, in order to estimate the maximum force required in the equipment designed for use in this method. On the basis of the orthogonal cutting theory and the peel zone method, a scraping method and its cutting force model are proposed in this paper for the surface cleaning of marine steel piles. The finite element method was used to verify the analytical model errors. The comparison showed that the relative errors of the cutting force are less than 10%. Our model can be used for cutting force estimation in cleaning equipment design. Our analysis shows that the blade rake angle has a large effect on the cutting force and that the optimum blade rake angle design is a compromise between blade strength and cutting force. We conclude that increasing the blade rake angle can reduce the cutting force in this scraping process; a medium blade rake angle [30°, 60°] is recommended, considering both cutting force and blade strength.