Assessment of deformed loading platforms: site survey and FEA (Inventor)

Engineering consultancy team project (BRAVNN, 2025). At an industrial plant, trucks are loaded and unloaded by forklift over a lifting platform and a rear platform. Both were already deformed, and the client needed to know if they could still carry the working load. I surveyed both structures on site with a colleague, modeled them in Inventor including the deformations we measured, ran finite element analyses with 4,500 kg (forklift plus load) and wrote both calculation reports. Both pass: the lifting platform reached 79.7 MPa (safety factor 3.14) and the rear platform 63.4 MPa (3.94), against a required minimum of 3 for A36 steel.