What is Inventor Professional?
Inventor Pro is a trusted, professional-grade design and engineering software. It is a complete design solution, from design to manufacturing and beyond. Inventor can automate complex design workflows as well as everyday repetitive tasks, and it connects your processes from concept through to make, and it promotes collaboration amongst teams and your customers.
Who are FeTu?
FeTu was established in 2016 and is based in West Yorkshire. They have created a revolutionary ‘green’ energy device, known as “Roticulate”, targeting carbon reduction across a broad range of industries and applications. This disruptive enabling technology provides a versatile ‘continuous positive displacement’ machine that inherently lends itself to being cost-effective and highly efficient.
The FeTu ‘roticulating’ concept is perceived as the world’s first ‘quad-acting’ device (duplex double-acting). It is lightweight and scalable and uses just two moving parts to operate four anti-phased compression chambers, offering low-loss conversion from potential to kinetic energy.
The Challenge
This concept, developed entirely within Inventor Professional, requires precision engineering and repeat clash-detection analysis throughout every aspect of development. Various design changes can (and invariably do) occur through each project review and FeTu need to ensure that performance is not compromised with each and every assembly update.
The Problem
Lots of manual calculations and processes. They’ve got to perform the same tests on all four chambers, taking several hours each. Resulting in up to 2 days’ work per complete analysis. Furthermore, if subsequent changes are required, the engineers have to perform all of the analyses from scratch.
As the majority of the parameters being applied were repetitive and the data being inputted was being extracted from the model, FeTu was convinced there had to be another way and contacted Quadra to ask if there was anything that could be done to perhaps halve the time it takes to achieve these results.
…Halve? We can do much better than that….
The Solution
Matt Hutchinson, one of Quadra’s Senior Application Engineers, set to work for 7 hours (6.75 to be precise) using Inventor Pro’s built-in iLogic automation environment, to create a modular routine that can now be dropped onto any of FeTu’s Roticulate assemblies. This routine essentially rotates an angle constraint, performs an interference check to report the number of clash instances and volume of each interference, records the results, then increments the angle by 1 degree and repeats …again …and again …tabulating each result into a report and outputting in a format which can then be exported into Excel for interrogation.
The Result
“Matt was incredible (he used that word). He has reduced our work from nearly 6 hours to 6 minutes per chamber and we couldn’t be happier” [John Fenton, FeTu Managing Director]
In conclusion, Inventor’s out of the box capability is industry recognised. But what often goes UNrecognised is just how much you can do when you step ‘out of that box’ and go a few steps further, applying a bit of technical expertise to automate and program Inventor Pro to do much more with your parts and assemblies, much faster, whilst maintaining accuracy from the model data with minimal user input.
Expand into Inventor Professional
We get it… very few people have the expertise to correctly develop routines or modules within Inventor. That’s where Matt and the team can help.
If you have a similar problem, that’s both repetitive and time-consuming and you have that nagging suspicion that there IS a better way, just do what FeTu did – get in touch and see how we can help!
For more information please contact us today!
