Hydrotherapy is a supervised exercise session conducted in a specially designed swimming pool. The therapy is expected to induce healing health&nbsp;conditions against&nbsp;osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammation and other ailments.&nbsp;Hydropool is a pool intended for such aquatic therapy whereby the users are seated in wheel- or special-chairs on top of a platform that will be slowly submerged into the pool.&nbsp;However,&nbsp;the platform structure and hoisting mechanism of&nbsp;hydropools&nbsp;can be physically strenuous&nbsp;&nbsp;for&nbsp;disabled people&nbsp;especially&nbsp;when entering and leaving the pool. Apart from that, the cost of the lifting&nbsp;systems&nbsp;is&nbsp;often high owing to the sophisticated&nbsp;hydraulic or pneumatic&nbsp;apparatus&nbsp;and materials used. Thus, it is essential to&nbsp;design and&nbsp;analyze&nbsp;a&nbsp;hydropool&nbsp;platform&nbsp;and lifting mechanism&nbsp;to&nbsp;transcend these limitations.&nbsp;This study presents the numerical analysis of&nbsp;a 1200 mm (width)&nbsp;by&nbsp;1015 mm (length) platform structure,&nbsp;and a&nbsp;scissor&nbsp;mechanism to lift the platform&nbsp;from a 1750-mm deep pool.&nbsp;The platform in this study is intended to support submersion of a single user and shall be scaled up to multiple users in future studies. The structure comprises nineindividual components including base, scissor links, supporting links, connecting links, leadscrew, platform, fence, bolts and nuts.&nbsp;The design objective is to minimize mass at optimum load carrying capacity with a reasonable safety factor. A few design options are considered to achieve this objective. A virtual model of the selected design is created&nbsp;using SolidWorks®&nbsp;software.&nbsp;Finite element analysis (FEA)&nbsp;on the model is&nbsp;conducted using&nbsp;the&nbsp;ANSYS®&nbsp;workbench in static structural mode to evaluate the von&nbsp;Mises stresses&nbsp;and total deformations&nbsp;of the platform when&nbsp;a&nbsp;maximum load&nbsp;of 2943 N (300 kg)&nbsp;is applied&nbsp;vertically on the structure.&nbsp;The structure is made of SS316, which has a yield strength at 0.2% offset of 205 MPa as per the&nbsp;ASTM A276/A276M standard. The FEA results showed that the maximum von Mises stress of 67.9 MPa is obtained at the scissor link component of the structure. The corresponding maximum total deformation is 1.33 mm. The safety factor of the platform and lifting system is 3.02, or equivalent to 33.1% of the yield strength of SS316 at the maximum applied load. These observations indicate that the platform structure and scissor-lifting mechanism designed in this study is safe under the loading conditions used in the simulation. Further investigation will be carried out to scale up this single stage platform design to a multiple-users structure.

Design and Structural Analysis of a Lifting Platform for Hydrotherapy Pool

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.