British Antarctic Survey says that using Autodesk Inventor 3D CAD to design and prototype products for one of the most hostile environments on the planet is delivering a cool 40% time saving.
“The 3D modelling aspect is a huge advantage in dealing with scientists,” says BAS mechanical design engineer Andy Tait. “They come to us with ideas of what they want, but 2D drawings are very limited in getting across what the finished article will look like.
He’s talking about everything from rugged digital cameras for monitoring sea ice, to tethered stakes measuring movement of ice over glacial streams, and star-pointing telescopes for atmospheric ozone studies.
Tait explains that the team used to use RoboCAD, but moved to AutoCAD and then Mechanical Desktop, before moving up to Inventor. “With 3D visualisation, which is very realistic and accurate, they can interact with us on the design at a much earlier stage, to check the size is what they’d imagined, or the flexibility, for example.
“Sometimes it could be something simple, like the device being the wrong size to handle when wearing gloves, or that it needs to be easier to assemble and take apart in the icy conditions. Having 3D has helped unbelievably.
“We can now call the model up and the scientists can investigate it and see how the components come together. Before, we had to make the item first and then the scientist might have said ‘Ah, it would have been better if we could have had X’.”
He says that means time and cost benefits. “Inventor … brings in projects much more cost-effectively, because there is no need for physical prototyping and yet our finished products are much closer to what the scientists need. We are now probably close to 40% better at getting the product right first time, compared with before when we had to respectively improve a design further down the line.”
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