CASE STUDY - Industrial Equipment

CASE STUDY - Industrial Equipment

Company: Hexagon Metrology Nordic AB 

Industry: Metrology / Industrial Measurement Tools

Location: Sweden

Company Background:

Hexagon Metrology is part of the Hexagon-group, and markets several leading metrology brands for industrial measuring. These brands represent a globally installed base of millions of coordinate measuring machines, portable measuring systems and hand tools, along with tens of thousands of software licenses within metrology.

The Challenge:

In order to offer their customers industry leading metrology equipment, the engineers at Hexagon needed a 3D design system that offered performance, flexibility and full collaboration. With their current packages, AutoCAD and Solidworks, Hexagon felt these needs were not being meet.  Due to this, they felt they needed to investigate other design options thereby allowing Hexagon to design and offer the best products possible to their customers.

The IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite: 

After testing the IronCAD Design Collaboration Suite (DCS), specifically IRONCAD, the DCS’s premier 3D design application, Hexagon’s engineers saw that the needs for performance, flexibility and collaboration would be met.  Due to IRONCAD’s “Innovative Design” technology, Hexagon’s engineers were free from the limitations of traditional 3D modelers such as always having to work with constraints and parametric relationships. Innovative Design means you don’t work with constraint and parametric relationship unless you want to. 

Click here to learn more about IRONCAD’s Innovative Design. 

Another factor was IRONCAD’s ability to work with multiple parts and assemblies within one single file, making data management much simpler. In traditional 3D systems each part is a single file on your hard drive or network. When creating large assemblies, you are literally managing thousands of files which is time consuming and very prone to errors. With IRONCAD, you can have as many parts and assemblies as you want inside one file. It’s entirely up to the engineer has how they chose to store their data. IRONCAD also uses catalogs to help you quickly and easily design, adding items to and from a catalog is as simple as a drag & drop maneuver and these catalogs can be shared across the network with other DCS users.

Finally there was the issue of working with the volumes of legacy 2D data Hexagon had accumulated over the years. IRONCAD DRAFT, one of the applications in the DCS helped address this by offering a fully compatible DWG editing tool with a very similar interface to AutoCAD making the transition to the DCS almost seamless. 

Summary:

• 75% productivity increase over Solidworks.
• No longer being limited by constraints and parametric relationships.
• A single scene design environment and catalogs making data management much simpler.
• Full ability to work with legacy 2D data with IRONCAD DRAFT. 

“We have replaced both AutoCAD and SolidWorks with IRONCAD. Many different fixtures and tools have been designed at Hexagon. When it comes to 3D-design, we do see a big advantage by using IRONCAD. Our experience has been that we design faster and easier compared to our earlier solution because we don’t need to struggle with parametric relations and constraints. With IRONCAD, we can design a whole project in a single file and we also get great usage with the catalogs by dragging and dropping parts and assemblies into new designs whenever needed.” -Patrik Kärrvall, R&D Manager, Hexagon Metrology Nordic AB

IronCAD Announces Superior FEA Integration Update

IronCAD Announces Superior FEA Integration Update

Multi-Physics For IronCAD Speeds Up First Time User Acceptance Of FEA Design Simulation

ATLANTA GA, April 28, 2015 - IronCAD, a leading provider of design productivity solutions, today announced an exciting upgrade of their integrated Multi-Physics (MPIC) solution from AMPS. The feedback from users and partners adopting the solution has been phenomenal. Real world experience with the combined pre- and post-processing environment has dramatically improved performance of "what if" analysis.

The integration also promises to speed up first time user acceptance and it provides existing users with an intuitive, unified interface. The newest MPIC version takes advantage of multi-core multi-CPU systems using an advanced lock-free multi-thread pool design which promises considerably faster analysis results. IronCAD's innovative design with integrated feature and direct geometry modification, tight FEA integration and tolerant meshing allows users to work with imprecise models thus reducing the time spent repairing minor design flaws. After evaluating FEA results, users can further optimize their models even if they are working on CAD data from a different vendor.

The latest MPIC integration employs Sefea (Strain Enriched FEA), a proven method developed by AMPS Technologies Co. and presently available only in AMPS products. This new technology promises reduced memory load and radically reduced analysis time.

Mr. Max Schautzgy of Speedy Engineering had this to say, "I am really fascinated with the analysis speed paired with high accuracy that I get by using the Sefea method. In other FEA programs, I have to use smaller elements with more nodes to achieve desired results. Sefea allows us to analyze much larger assemblies without having to wait for results – and all this without sacrificing accuracy".

Cary O'Connor VP Marketing for IronCAD added, "IronCAD's Innovative Design and tightly integrated FEA makes it easy for designers to test and verify design concepts during the development stage. Our MPIC solution is simple to learn and it does not require our users to spend hours preparing models for FEA. Users simply design assemblies and at a push of a few buttons can apply materials, loads/constraints, and perform the analysis while the system takes care of many of the tedious tasks in traditional FEA applications."

The latest release of Multi-Physics for IronCAD can be downloaded at http://www.ironcad.com/MPIC.

About IronCAD


Based in Atlanta, GA, IronCAD is a leading provider of 3D Design Productivity Solutions that deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction and productivity. Individual components of this solution can be used standalone, complementary within an existing design environment, or can be used together to collaborate effectively throughout the enterprise to extend productivity. Its flagship product IRONCAD has won many industry awards for its innovative technology and leads the industry in its ease of use and design productivity. IronCAD products are being used successfully by thousands of customers worldwide. For more information on IronCAD, call 1-800-339-7304 or visit www.ironcad.com.