Abstract—This paper deals with the new method to design the optimum design for hospital bed, which can support the left and or right leg for patient‘s leg splint. GAs as an optimization method was selected to search the minimum mass of bed structure whilst fulfilling some structure constraints such as stress, displacement and buckling. The GAs and FE code were developed to analyze the structure in MATLAB. Two optimization problems were set to search the minimum mass. In Problem I, the height and width of cross-section in each element was varied from 1 to 5 cm. Whilst the height and width of cross-section in Problem II were selected from 1, 2 and 5 cm. The minimum masses achieved from both problems were 57.31 and 49.25 kg, respectively. The minimum masses obtained from Problem II were more than that from Problem I but it practically made the bed structure easier. Therefore, this paper demonstrates that it is possible to design the hospital bed for independently supporting left and or right leg by using the concepts of GAs combined with FEM to search the optimum mass.
Index Terms—finite element, Genetic Algorithms, hospital bed, optimization.
Rung Kittipichai is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University, Nakhonpathom, 73170, Thailand (corresponding author; phone: 662-889-2138 ext. 6401; e-mail: egrkt@mahidol.ac.th).
Atthaphon Ariyarit is with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University, Nakhonpathom, 73170, Thailand (e-mail: u5013419@student.mahidol.ac.th).
Cite: Rung Kittipichai and Atthaphon Ariyarit, "The Sizing Optimization of Hospital Bed Structure for Independently Supporting Left and or Right Leg Using Genetic Algorithms," International Journal of Modeling and Optimization vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 122-128, 2011.
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