Product category:
Infrastructure and CAD Software
News Release from: SolidWorks Corporation | Subject: COSMOS analysis software
Edited by the Buildingtalk Editorial
Team on 14 November 2006
Company saves with COSMOS analysis
software
LeBARON Foundry streamlined designs, lightening manhole covers and frames by as much as 50 pounds with COSMOS analysis software.
The humble manhole cover is easy to overlook - unless you work for LeBARON Foundry of Brockton, Mass., the dominant supplier of cast iron products to New England's construction market The 150-year-old company pours 100 tons of molten iron a day to supply the region with nearly all of its manhole and sewer drain covers
This article was originally published on Buildingtalk on 21 Nov 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Although its products are low-tech, the company has used high technology, specifically SolidWorks and COSMOS software, to great advantage.
"We're saving more than $500,000 on raw material costs annually because of design work performed in SolidWorks 3D CAD software and facilitated by COSMOS analysis software," said LeBARON Foundry President Steve Clinch.
The story began in December 2003, when scrap metal prices spiked, tripling over the next six months, thus tripling LeBARON's raw material costs.
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The company had no way to pass along these costs because it was locked into long-term contracts with municipalities.
Fortuitously, Clinch had just invested in SolidWorks Office Premium, which includes COSMOSWorks Designer software, in hopes of updating the company's manual product testing processes.
Those processes employed hydraulic presses applying upwards of 60 tons of force to determine their strength.
Clinch set up simulations in COSMOSWorks Designer, built samples in the resulting geometries, and tested them against real-world conditions to establish validity.
He quickly determined that many of its best-selling products were significantly over-designed - i.e., they were thicker than they needed to be.
Using SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks Designer, Clinch and his team quickly redesigned a wide variety of the products in less than two days each.
This process shaved as much as 50 pounds of material from a typical manhole cover.
It was a savings of as much as 25 percent by weight without sacrificing safety.
The company recouped the company's projected shortfall, estimated at more than $500,000 in the first year alone.
"Sure, we could have done this without COSMOS," he said.
"We could have built a pattern, made castings, noted when they broke, made a leaner pattern, and repeated the cycle ad nauseum until we ran out of time and money".
"It would have been a horrendously time-consuming and expensive process".
"With COSMOSWorks Designer, I was able to iterate six different models in two afternoons until I came up with streamlined designs that still had more than adequate strength".
"Our work was simplified by an easy-to-use, relatively inexpensive finite element analysis product combined with an elegant 3D CAD package".
"I think the world of these products".
LeBARON is now using SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks Designer to expand its product line to include custom configurations".
""You'd think that after 15 decades there would be nothing more to say about manhole covers," said SolidWorks Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Rainer Gawlick".
""What this story teaches us is that sharp minds using powerful tools can always design better products".
"Sometimes these improvements yield extraordinary benefits".
LeBARON Foundry relies on authorized SolidWorks reseller CADD Edge for ongoing software training, implementation, and support.
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