Shameless Self Promotion

If there is one thing that I'm learning from LeBrondo James is that it's all about the electrolytes. Ohh, good movie reference there...anyone? No, it's all about shameless self promotion and in that light I dub thee (the royal thee - myself) the "Real Time Conceptual Design to Engineering and Analysis to Documentation and Assembly" King. Or RTCDEADA King for short.  

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we were invited to participate in a Design Charrette hosted by the Rocky Mountain Institute. More on the event itself from my post Here Comes the Sun. This event turned out to be more than I had hoped for. What an amazing group of engineers, architects, scholars, and geniuses that think on a level that is at once inspiring and humbling. With that type of talent in the room, nothing but the A game was going to make a difference here.

And that's just what we brought (see, told you shameless self promotion...). In order to optimize the design of both roof mounted and ground mounted solar panels we needed to know exactly what forces were applied to the structural members from wind. Jay Tedeschi fired up a little Algor CFD, passed along those results to both teams and now we could get to the business of proving or disproving design assumptions.

I'll quote Seth Hindman who was also part of the Autodesk contingent, I think he summarizes the participants experience perfectly. "Being able to capture designs in their schematic or physical form, evaluate mechanics and motion, produce quality visualizations and animation as well as run real time CFD and FEA analysis blew the assembled participants away! We not only exceeded expectations of what we could deliver, I think we elevated their understanding of who Autodesk really is." And now you see why I quoted rather than trying to paraphrase, dude is quite the wordsmith.

So that's the key difference in what we could bring to the table. Going into it, we touted what we could do, but I'm not sure it really sunk in until the participants were able to experience it. Too often engineering and documentation is something that is done after the initial design meetings, rarely in real time, while important decisions or assumptions are made. Why? 3D CAD models are just that - a snap shot in time representation of an idea and the assumption is that it takes a long time to setup and isn't useful for conceptual design meetings. In this event we blew that perception out of the water. We took concept sketches, refined them into digital models, analyzed the design to make sure it could hold up to loads, created assembly instructions, and high quality images all from the Digital Prototype - in real time! 

At one point in time one of the guys was sketching out a critical component of the ground mount assembly on a flip chart. While he did that I started modeling it up, as they discussed whether or not the part would work I was putting it through FEA. No kidding, just as he asked me if I would model this up, the analysis completed - I turned my laptop around and said "yes, and at 1/4" material its strong enough to hold up..."

Sweet, right. The timing of it was a coincidence, I know - but it was still cool. Paul Cousens sent me an email from one of his customers that attended the event, here was Skye's take: "It was great to meet Rob at the RMI charrette (which was fantastic, by the way).  He and the other Autodesk folks were an incredible asset to the charrette.  Honestly.  It was literally incredible to have the ability within our group to go from brainstorm to FEA to total cost info in one continuous two hour session.  Rob, equipped with the Inventor Suite, was literally the hub of that wheel.  Awesome." 

So that's that. I'll go back to my humble ways again. Politely destroying perceptions of engineering with Autodesk Inventor, and what we are capable here at Autodesk. Back to my Clark Kent persona... Yeah, like that's going to happen!

Have a great weekend everyone,
-Rob

 

Comments

[Scott]

Awesome, hopefully we will get that well set up for our cabinetry one day.