Articles tagged with Develop3d

As I write this, the final touches are being put to the March edition of DEVELOP3D. The layouts are being tweaked, “it’s” is being changed to “its” and vice versa and it’s looking sweet. What have we got in store for you this month? The answer is a veritable feast.

This month’s cover story centres on Brompton Bicycles, a UK manufacturer with a global market for its legendary folding bicycle. While the story has been expertly crafted by our very own France Corbett, I went along (if you’ll forgive the horrific pun) for the ride. When you’re looking to write a story there are a few things you don’t want to happen. One of them is to walk into a meeting room and the man in charge of design wanders in, somewhat nervously and states “We don’t use much technology.”
But what transpired over the next hour or so is that the Brompton Team not only use 3D CAD (In this case SolidWorks, but they use it in a very holistic manner. Key components of the bike are redesigned to change process, to add strength or new functionality and these are done in SolidWorks. Renderings are done, FEA is conducted, FDM parts are built to verify fit ann function, SLA parts are used for casting prototypes. Jigs and Fixtures are designed in 3D and the same product data is used to generate illustrations for the user and service manuals. For a company that does not use much technology, they certainly know how to ‘not’ use it. Marvellous.

Elsewhere Stephen takes a look at what’s happening on the factory floor with this month’s Product Development Gallery and also visit J Lawson Limited, an expert model maker working on some rather interesting and often highly secretive projects who luckily allowed Stephen into his workshop to show off what he does.

Bob Johnson of DAMT and well known figure on the NAFEMS seminar circuit continues his Engineering Workshop series, continuing on from last month’s peice on unit conversion, with a look at forces, moments and free body diagrams. Personally I love what Bob is doing for us, there’s a wealth of simulation tools out there but many are hesitant to jump on the bandwagon and give it a whirl because they can’t quite correlate the basic fundamentals of engineering and physics with the sometimes cryptic world of simulation. Bob’s here to help.

We’ve also got a few reviews in this issue too. There’s a look at Flownex from Athena-Horizons in the UK which provides a systems level simulation approach for all manner of industries, but one which focusses pretty much on the power generation industry. I get to conclude my three parter looking at Vero Software‘s VISI Series product (VISI for Design and VISI for Manufacture), rounding things out with a look at VISI Flow Finally, there’s a look at Sustainable MInds LCA software which gives you the tools and technology to both discover the environmental impact of your products and redesigns, but can also assist with bringing a greener future for your products when used from the very earliest stage of the development process.
DEVELOP3D for download (either as a PDF or via the iPhone app) and should be mailed out to print subscribers across the globe next week.

This month’s DEVELOP3D is now available for download and if you’re on the print subscriber’s list, then it’ll be winging it’s way to you shortly. This month we’ve got all manner of goodness coming up.

As always, Frances Corbet has been off finding companies that do amazing things and she’s come up trumps this issue with a look at how Mike Spindle and the team at Trekinetic are using their knowledge and expertise forged in the heady world of Formula 1 component manufacture (and a spark of inspiration and sheer perseverance) to revolutionise mobility for wheelchair users.

Elsewhere, ‘our Stephen’ (as we like to call him) has been off into the world of product development and come up with some fascinating stories. He looks at the latest products for the pets that mean so much to so many and I’m particularly covetous of the Eglu, having become accustomed to fresh eggs whilst on holiday. Stephen also tracked down (by which I mean, met in a pub) Cris Rose, a leading light in the Urban Vinyl scene, who’s using a combination of traditional skills, 3D design and rapid prototyping to bring his quirky art to reality.

Finally, Stephen headed North to visit Paragon Rapid Technology in Sunderland. The team does fascinating work and proves that despite the advances in digital design and rapid prototyping, when you want a prototype that’s going to knock peoples’ socks off, it’s going to take more than a rendering to do that – as Darren and his team did for the Nissan’s Qazana concept vehicle.

Greg’s been busy writing too, looking at the latest in workstation technology and in particular, focussing on how Intel has turbocharged Blue Ridge Numerics’ cluster- based solver for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).

And of course, there’s reviews. No issue would be complete without them and we have a good selection for you this month. There’s some 3D design action with IronCAD Next Generation which now mixes history and non-history based modelling workflows. We have advanced simulation with both Inventor Simulation 2010 and Abaqus 6.9, and the next generation of software for designers looking to automate their work with DriveWorks Solo. Finally, we look at what Geomagic has up its sleeve for those looking to integrate physical objects in their digital design workflows in Studio 11.

There you have it, Formula 1 inspired wheelchairs, modern chicken coops, a concept car and, did I mention, killer robots? I wonder what next month will bring. We’re keeping that under wraps for now, but we can assure you it will be fun. See you then. It’s available for download now.

Here’s an interesting announcement, Blue Ridge Numerics just announced the availability of the new UVCalc Module for its CFdesign CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) system

that allows the simulation and validation of ultraviolet (UV) reactor performance to ensure accurate fluence rates (irradiances) for UV light disinfection.

According to the folks at Blue Ridge, “The use of germicidal UV light is a rapidly expanding technology that is used to ensure public safety by deactivating the DNA of bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, removing their ability to multiply and cause disease.”

Design engineers developing UV applications for drinking water disinfection, wastewater treatment, and manufacturing processes for the food and beverage, medical device, pharmaceutical, and semiconductors industries (among others) can now use a familiar, CAD integrated system to further extend what can be simulated using the same tools and same datasets.

After all, when this type of technology is built into a system like CFdesign, it can be used as a part of the design process – something that’s critical for this type of work, as being able to accurate simulate such processes, early on, means you can not only catch errors earlier (prior to build), but also perform some optimization and refinement of your work based on simulation, rather than best guess. Where has this technology come from? the answer is Bolton Photosciences and Dr. Jim Bolton, a recognized expert in the UV calculation field and developer of UVCalc, now it is third generation. While we could wax lyrical about how this system works and what it can do, instead we asked Derrek Cooper (@derrekcooper) at Blue Ridge (@cfdesign) to show us:

This week Apple lifted the lid on Intel’s new Xeon processor, way in advance of the other major workstation vendors, and, much to our amazement, even in advance of Intel itself. The Quad Core chip will feature at the heart of all new Mac Pro desktop systems.

The Xeon version of the Core i7 (Nehalem) chip is no secret, but bizarrely there is still no mention of it on Intel’s website, and from what I understand Intel and all the major workstation vendors won’t ‘officially’ be talking about the new chip until the end of the month.

While it’s intriguing as to why Apple can talk about the processor while other hardware manufacturers can’t, what’s more important is what this chip will offer the CAD/CAM/CAE sector. Intel’s Xeon (Nehalem) is very much like Core i7, but unlike the Core i7 will be available in dual socket workstations. This means heaps of power for multithreaded applications, with the most obvious beneficiary being rendering which scales very well across multiple cores. While dual socket Quad Core workstations have been available for some time, what makes the Xeon (Nehalem) different is that it supports HyperThreading, which splits each physical core in to two. The first part of the core does the lion’s share of processing, while the other part squeezes in additional computational tasks as and when there is spare capacity.

For a dual processor Xeon workstation this means access to 16 cores in total (eight physical and eight logical) and while many CAD/CAM/CAE applications can’t take advantage of multi core processors, let alone HyperThreading, applications like 3ds Max, HyperShot and CAD-resident renderers will lap it up, so expect never been seen before levels of processing power on the desktop.

If you can’t wait until the end of the month, when all the major workstation manufacturers will be announcing their new Xeon (Nehalem) based workstation line ups, you could always go out and get your hands on a shiny new Mac Pro. After all, as Al Dean points out in his comment in the March edition of DEVELOP3D, Macs are back in a big way! Register here to make sure you bag yourself a copy.

DEVELOP3D’s very own Al Dean makes a guest appearance on the informative Novedge blog today. If you look beyond the incredibly scary picture of Al (he’s not that terrifying in real life, honest), you’ll find an in-depth interview carried out by Franco Folini where Al explains the rationale behind DEVELOP3D (the magazine) how we integrate online and offline content and why you’ll never ever see him in a pair of white wellington boots and thermal underwear again.

Even though I’ve heard some of the stories before, it’s certainly a fascinating read. The boy’s got passion.

www.novedge.com

The launch edition of DEVELOP3D is now available for FREE download. Simply click here and if you’ve already regsitered away you go. We’ve kept it above 10MB coz we didn’t want to ruin the look of the mag with all that nasty image compression. Anyway, let us know what you think.

www.develop3d.com/downloads