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Customer Story: Allan J. Hargreaves Plant Engineers

Tuesday October 15, 2019 at 3:00pm

“SOLIDWORKS Simulation allows us to reduce the weight, and therefore the cost, but also iron out any design problems
that we may encounter.”

Allan J. Hargreaves Plant Engineers repair, maintain, upgrade, refurbish and manufacture plant machinery for the rail industry. Every night plant machinery moves from our roads and onto the rail tracks to repair and maintain the UK’s rail infrastructure. This equipment is commonly standard plant machinery, fitted out with rail bogies to run along the tracks. In this article, we will look at how A.J. Hargreaves use SOLIDWORKS Simulation to test their designs before manufacture.

Safety is obviously a key priority for A.J. Hargreaves, with the rail industry being heavily regulated, the standards and testing are critical. A.J. Hargreaves currently hold ‘RISQS’, the Railway industry Supplier Qualification Scheme and ‘ISO9001:2015’ accreditation. Every project needs sign off from the rail authorities and SOLIDWORKS Simulation is important in proving the design intent during the design phase.

                                               

 

Before purchasing SOLIDWORKS Simulation, the design process was much different. The only way to guarantee the safety factors and reliability needed, would be to over-engineer the conversions. As Paul Hargreaves, Technical Director, points out this was both good and bad, “We would usually make things a lot bigger than they needed to be. Weight is our friend because we need to keep the machines that are working on the railway stable, so they don’t derail. However, having the extra weight meant our designs cost more. SOLIDWORKS Simulation allows us to reduce the weight and therefore cost, but also iron out any design problems that we may encounter.”

 

Simulation is now used in almost every project at A.J. Hargreaves with development time often cut from what used to be 3 months to just 6 weeks.

“When we were initially looking at SOLIDWORKS Simulation we were a bit hesitant to go with it, because we thought that our engineers would have to be highly skilled and qualified to use it, and that it would take us a long time to start seeing the benefits of using it and trying new ideas. But now once we made that leap and started using Simulation, it has become something that we use in a daily basis. We recruit engineers from different backgrounds some have only done 2D modelling, some have never done any modelling before, some have come from 3D modelling background but never used Simulation. However, the whole team has quite easily been able to adapt with some training and help from Solid Solutions and we were up and running pretty quickly”, says Paul.

Watch our full interview with Paul and similar customer stories on our YouTube channel. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF6frXZT69Q

To find out more about Allan J Hargreaves visit: http://www.ajhplant.com

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