DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Composites design is something that’s coming up a lot during my meetings with vendors. Only the other week I was looking at some simulation tools for simulation crack propagation across composite, multi-layered materials (that would be with the delightful chaps from Simulia when looking at Abaqus 6.10) as well as the composite design related tools in NX 7.5 from Siemens. Why the sudden concentration on composites? Facts are that these material types are becoming more and more commonplace outside of their traditional usage in Automotive. Only just this week the world’s first plastic plane (the Boeing 787) has landed on british soil for the first time at the Farnborough Airshow. Ok ok, it’s 50% carbon fibre but who can resist an overused cliche eh?.

Lamborghini’s new Composites centre brings a new level of expertise in an rapidly expanding field

Then an intriguing little press release popped into my inbox. It turns out that Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A has just opened a new Advanced Composites Research Center (ACRC) at its headquarters in Sant’Agata Bolognese, where the team will carry out research on innovative design and production methods for carbon-fibre elements. This has been built alongside development of an proprietary all-new, highly efficient production process for extremely complex carbon-fibre structures which has been “secured through an array of patents and constitutes a breakthrough into the next generation of carbon-fibre components.”

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The team from the University of Padova, Italy, push its car down to the judges

As the workers still clear away the stands and hospitality marquees from the previous weekend’s British Grand Prix, teams of students from across the world descended into the famous Silverstone pitlane for the annual Formula Student event.

Despite struggling through the blustery conditions, temperamental rain showers, and the fact that most of the teams had been up most of the night still finishing adjustments to their cars, the cheery bunch all seemed to be looking forward to getting their creations onto the hallowed track following a year of design and engineering.

Most of the British entrants are final year students, in some cases graduating days before the event, proudly displaying their final projects and getting the chance to work from the pitlanes still marked with F1 team liveries, logos and even tyre marks.

All the cars were modeled in 3D CAD, with some more comprehensively than others. With many of the teams made of pure automotive and motorsport degree classes, their proficiency for strength testing, FEA analysis, and component design in CAD was pretty impressive.

The team from Delft University, Holland, show off their finished car, and its Catia model

Most teams seemed to have worked with Catia for the chassis, although others modeled the full thing in SolidWorks, while a sparse few were using sponsor Autodesk’s Inventor, or the really professional were really going for it in Pro/Engineer. It was interesting to see that even between the teams with the greater budgets (a lot of the European universities spend a full year traveling to the various international versions and racing) and those without, a lot of the emphasis for modern track-car building was put on the initial 3D CAD model.

Some F1 heavyweights were on hand to offer advice and add to the pressure

And it wasn’t just students at the opening day; on hand were some big guns from the world of F1 racing. Renault F1 managing director Bob Bell; Mercedes (and Michael Schumacer’s personal) race engineer Andrew Shovlin; Virgin Racing technical director Nick Wirth; and even square-jawed, taller-than-you-expect, former-F1 driver David Coulthard were all on site to give a motivational talk, some pearls of wisdom, and kick some tyres in the garages.

With over 2,500 students taking part, and the majority wanting to progress into the automotive and motorsport industry, there was some serious competition to be had even before the cars take to the track for individual time trials, handling and breaking tests over the next three days.

www.formulastudent.com

It’s been a couple of weeks since I got back from Texas and the PLM Connection event held at the beginning of last month - but I’ve got a few thoughts and whatnot to share from the event. This was the first time that the press has been invited to the event and I was curious to find out what it was like, what the feeling was amongst the users in attendance and of course, to catch up with the folks at Siemens.

PLM Connections is organised by the user group committee, many of whom I got to meet on the first day. It’s clear that this is a user focussed event and the attendance and subject discussed reflects that. There’s often a difference between user events organised by the users (or a group of them), such as this and PTC’s PTC/User events and those organised by the software vendor (think SolidWorks World). It’s quite difficult to put a finger on the different between the two, but there’s something. Whatever it is, both types are focussed on three things: Learning, Updating and Networking.

The learning is satisfied by just under 400 technical sessions that reach across the entire Siemens portfolio - while the event began as an NX (or Unigraphics) focussed event, it now brings together those users with those from the Teamcenter, Tecnomatix and Solid Edge communities. What I found interesting, speaking to a number of both the organisational committee and the users in general, is that they’re typically there for an update on several items from that list - predominately NX and Teamcenter, but the others get a good look into the mix.

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A couple of weeks back Autodesk named West Hills Construction (WHC) - a California–based contracting firm with an energy division that integrates energy management solutions into commercial, industrial and manufacturing facilities - as its Inventor of the Month. I caught up with Rusty Wood, vice president of WHC’s Energy Division, to ask him some questions about this achievement. First up, how does it feel? “It is a wonderful honour to be named Autodesk Inventor of the Month. We just saw a great tool that we could use in our industry and figured out how to make it work for us. It has paid itself back ten times over,” he says.

The types of companies that approach WHC are those that want to reduce the energy use of their facility and at the same time save money. After carrying out an Investment Grade Audit to determine what the needs of the facility are, WHC recommend a combination of different technologies including photovoltaic arrays, wind turbines and energy storage devices that interact with a facility to save the client money. “The name of the game is offsetting their energy bills over 20 year project life spans,” explains Wood.

For instance, WHC was recently contracted to design an energy management system using photovoltaic arrays for a 37-foot-tall, 86 000 square foot building that desired onsite energy generation. WHC used Autodesk software throughout the design and construction of this massive energy management system. “We use Autodesk from the very start of a job in a 2D format to get a rough idea of what we wish to design. Once we have a solid 2D design in either the standard Autodesk program (Electrical 2011, Mechanical 2011) we’ll push the 2D design over to Inventor, 3DMax or Maya to start the 3D process. Once we have completed our model in Inventor, we either take the model and push it to Showcase 3DMax, or Maya to put the finishing touches on the 3D renderings for our sales and bid presentations,” says Wood.

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