The paper’s subject is highly topical, is very interesting from scientific point of view but also very complex. The authors propose to study the elastic structures of the cranes on basis of the similarity criteria, for this purpose the two basis criteria are shortly presented: Hooke and Cauchy. One underlines that the gantry and the half gantry cranes work outside, being subjected to actions as time changing loads; under these circumstances one needs a special check of the crane’s stability. The basic study is that one based on the analysis with finite elements, using ABAQUS software – an advanced software with highly efficient possibilities of modeling. By graphical post processing are presented the equivalent fields of stresses von Mises and of deformations.
