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