Race For Renewable Energy

The Scottish government recently announced the Grand Challenge Phase of the £10 million Saltire Prize for renewable energy companies to encourage development of tidal and wave energy devices.

Over a two year period, Aquamarine Power, Pelamis Wave Power, Scottish Power Renewables and MeyGen will be racing to produce the most amount of electricity possible from Scottish waters.  Aquamarine’s Saltire Prize project will see its Oyster wave energy converter deployed off the Isle of Lewis.  Three projects will compete in the Pentland Firth & Orkney Waters - Pelamis' wave power device at Farr Point,  MeyGen’s tidal energy project in the Inner Sound and ScottishPower Renewables at Ness of Duncansby with the HS1000 tidal turbine developed by Andritz Hydro Hammerfest.   As well as developing new technology and producing renewable energy, the competition will also benifit Stromness on Orkney where a new access point and pier will be constructed.

Two of the four companies taking part are customers of TMS CADCentre, utilising SolidWorks for the design of their 'green' machines.  We would like to wish Pelamis and Aquamrine Power the best of luck in their quest for the Saltire Prize!

“I am delighted to see Aquamarine Power and Pelamis being recognised for their work in the renewable sector.  Their commitment and desire to provide a better and greener alternative to current energy technologies is truly inspiring.  We wish both of our clients the very best in their quest for the Saltire Prize” – Alex Lowe -  TMS Director   

Aquamarine Power

Pelamis Wave Power 

Going for gold with Poolpod and SolidWorks

When the Olympic Delivery Authority for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games could not find a pool lift that satisfied their exacting requirements for functionality and accessibility, they launched an international competition to find the right design.

Poolpod Products LTD, a creative industrial design company based in Glasgow UK, took up the challenge and submitted their designs for Poolpod, a unique submersible platform lift. Designed around the needs of less ambulant people, families with small children, wheelchair users as well as for rehabilitation and aqua-therapy purposes Poolpod now forms a part of the legacy of London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The company’s innovative solution to the brief, adaptable industrial design skills, and progressive user-focused design philosophy ensured that the ODA selected them to develop their ideas.

Throughout the project the design team were exposed to numerous design challenges, but their ability to provide inventive design solutions (such as the hands free operation of the system) coupled with a robust and constructive partnership between client and design team helped maintain the momentum of the development process and ensured the functional and commercial success of the Poolpod.

Pool operators and swimmers have been universally positive about the design of the Poolpod whilst legislation and economics support widespread installation in public pools.

Following the first Poolpod installation, people with restricted mobility in East London can now enter the swimming pool independently using Poolpod.  The Olympics legacy begins in East London, followed by 7 further pilot installations across the UK by the Amateur Swimming Association and Poolpod have plans to launch in the United States in 2013.

  

Poolpod Products Ltd selected SolidWorks Premium software because of its ease of use, compatibility with other 3D technologies, manufacturing flexibility, and sheet-metal and tubing design capabilities. By deploying SolidWorks CAD software, the company accelerated time-to-market on its exclusive PoolPod product. SolidWorks dramatically improved their handling of complex and intricate assemblies, reduced the time required to take digital 3D and 2D models and transfer them into physical prototypes whilst also enhancing its design visualisation and communication capabilities.

  

"Poolpod was a challenging development with some complex geometries and large bill of material, we required powerful design software with features that allowed us to test and refine our designs quickly using both prototyping, and simulation.  We chose the Solidworks Environment as it offered the best value, feature rich and accessible CAD system for our needs"  Josh Reid, MD PoolPod Product Ltd

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SolidWorks Premium - Electrical Routing

Putting power into your designs

SolidWorks has a wealth of tools for designing machines and control systems, but how do we make them go?

As a mechanical engineer I always felt a them and us relationship existed between the 'clankies' and the 'sparkies'.  We design an amazing system, but do not take into account where all the cabling is going to go.  In addition you go to the shop floor and there always seems to be a huge amount of cabling left over at the end of every job.

How can we design better?  This is where SolidWorks Premium comes to our aid with SolidWorks Routing.  SolidWorks Routing allows us as designers to quickly and easily lay out the cabling, tubing and piping in our designs.  A future post will take a look at the pipe work and tubing, but here we'll focus on the electrical tool set.

SolidWorks Electrical Routing allows us to place all our cabling into our systems:

This includes ribbon cables which can be folded as below, or flexible to follow a more complex route.

Alternatively you may need to use standard 'off the shelf' cables.  The image below shows a standard 300mm long CAT5 cable.  All that's required is to place the connectors and SolidWorks will then do the rest ensuring that the drawn cable is exactly the correct length.

Or you may well need something far more complex.  Here we see a cable loom that connects to a number of different ports on a few key components within this control panel.

SolidWorks Routing has given me the tools to place the components and link them through the various clips to generate a finished model.  Then the question arises as to how we get this made.  Here again SolidWorks Routing has the answer.  From a complex three dimensional route we can generate a simplified flattened harness board layout.

This is a 1:1 drawing of the cable run.  We have dimensions marked on it giving the length of each segment, but also you can see a large number of tables as well.  These tables are inserted automatically.  Let's see what they are. 

The first is the Circuit summary.  It lists the wire type, ID, Colour, length and what component it goes from and to:

Each end connector also has a table beside it listing the wire ID and which pin it connects to:

Finally we see the bill of materials for this route.  Besides listing the components it also lists the total length of cable/wire required to finish the job.

Another side of electrical routing that we haven't shown is electrical conduit.  We can place our rigid/flexible trunking in the systems.  This also gives all the same great level of detail listing the lengths and junction boxes required to get the job done.

SolidWorks Electrical Routing gives us the tools to ensure that we only order what is required for any particular job.  We can give the electricians accurate and precise measurements for them to work to.  We can make sure that we leave suitable clearance for the cabling.  Saving money on material, time on ensuring cables are the right length, and pain by ensuring that all members of the team can get the project finished.

Contact us for more information

Popa - The iPhone Camera Revolution

Recently, one of our customers has been getting a lot of press due to a fantastic new product that could be a revolution in the way we use our iPhones. 

Meso Design, who are based in Paisley, teamed up with Beep Industries to design Popa for the iPhone 4.  Popa is a device which fits directly onto the phone to give you the feel and functionality of a digital camera. 

Designed in SolidWorks, the product is available now for purchase through the thisispopa.com website.  You can also read about some of the Hollywood interest the team has been receiving by clicking on the links below.  Congratulations guys on another innovative product developed using SolidWorks! 

Paisley Daily Express

The Gazette

SolidWorks Premium - Simulation

SolidWorks has a fantastic range of tools that allows us to design a vast array of products.  A key question in the design process is will the product work?

Is it strong enough?

With SolidWorks Simulation embedded within SolidWorks Premium, these questions can be answered quickly allowing the design to progress along the right path. 

How often is a product designed, with many man hours expended only for it to fail when it's sent to be analysed?

It takes time to export the files out so that other tools can test and
then this needs to be repeated each time a new test is required.

SolidWorks Simulation is built-in. 

It's just an extra tab on a toolbar.  Here is an example:

I am part of a design team working on a bench
mounted mitre saw and have designed a new
Yoke component.  Is my design any good?  Can
it withstand the forces it will experience during
operational use?

To get the answer we set up a
quick study.  The values I used
were from a previous test:

We removed any parts that were already tested to
ensure that the results were calculated even quicker.  The study looked like the image below:

Running the analysis only took a minute, but the great thing about SolidWorks Simulation is that it does not tie up SolidWorks during the calculation.  We can still use SolidWorks to progress other areas of the design or other projects.

Once the analysis is complete we can generate vast amounts of data to interrogate the result.  Here we see a Factor of Safety plot looking at the performance of the part measured against the yield strength of the material used. 

In this test the minimum is over 7 (The load could be increased sevenfold and the part would still not fail) so we should reduce weight in the part.  A quick model update and we can run the test again:

The minimum is now just over 2.5.  This is an acceptable value for this project so we can now finish the design sure that this part will withstand the operational loading.

This is just a small example of how SolidWorks Simulation can help the engineers and designers to ensure that they are not only designing better looking products, but also ensure that they are fit for purpose.  It all happens within the same familiar design environment and there is minimal additional skills required to get some truly useful and detailed results.

To see a video of Simulation in action, click here

SolidWorks Premium - CircuitWorks

One of the main challenges facing Product Designers today is where to start in packaging a new design around a PCB. More often than not you’re left in a position where you have to reverse engineer a 2D layout provided by an Electronics Engineer. While being frustrating, this is time consuming and no guarantee that the components you’re interpreting are the correct size or position when converting to a 3D assembly.

With SolidWorks Premium you can let CircuitWorks do all the work for you.

 

CircuitWorks will allow you to open most 3^rd party ECAD software files (IDF, PADS, and ProStep) so to review the PCB design and all components populated both sides. Filter tools allow different layers to be activated or hidden to aid better understanding of the layout.

Subtle design changes can also be applied to the PCB’s components such as an increase in the height of a resistor.

 

 But what we really strive for is to create that all important 3D PCB assembly. Simply instructing CircuitWorks to ‘Build Model’ will generate this. Drawing from its vast component library, resistors, capacitors, and microchips are all imported into SolidWorks.

 

Within minutes you are presented with a tangible and editable assembly that leaves you with the boundaries to model an efficient, aesthetic and compact enclosure.

Alternatively, should your packaging design need to drive a change on the PCB, make the change in SolidWorks and then save the layout back to an ECAD format. By doing this, SolidWorks demonstrates how it can provide total collaboration between the Product Designer and Electronics Engineer.

For more information on SolidWorks Premium, give us a call or click here

SolidWorks Premium

Over the next few weeks, we're going to start running a weekly article on some of the functionality contained within SolidWorks Premium.  There are many new tools contained in the Premium version when you make the upgrade from Professional, and we want to make sure you know all about them.

Even if you're not using SolidWorks Premium at the moment, this information will be useful to your future plans and what tools you'll need to speed up your processes, verify your designs and stay ahead of the competition.

Stay tuned...