Abstract
The statistics of recent accidents in warehouses show that a heavy toll of lives were produced by various accidents, e.g. collision, overturn, fall, slip, exposure to harmful substances or environments, etc. Of significant concern amongst them is the collision, especially the collision between forklift and storage rack structure. Accordingly, this study focuses on behavioral characteristics of rack structure subjected to dynamic impact loading of a forklift. For this purpose, time-domain response analysis has been performed on a standard 2-bay six-story rack structure consisting of columns, beams and bracing members with perforated open section. In order to investigate the most critical scenario, the impact loads are applied in both down-aisle and cross-aisle directions, and the impact locations are also varied along the shelves of the palettes. In order to deal with storage distributions, three types of rack structures are further taken into account: original empty rack structure with no storage, half-loaded rack structure and fully-loaded rack structure. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the dynamic characteristics of the rack structure are significantly dependent on the distribution of the storage goods and its natural period varies from 0.24sec to 1.06sec, approximately 4.4 times. Further, the parametric studies show that the forklift impact is most critical to the safety of the rack structure when it collides either at the base or at the top of the rack structure.