When the chips are down, use Inventor
Published Mon 5 Oct 2009
An Irish engineering company is using Inventor to get the most from renewable biomass fuels.
Kerry Die Products has been in business for three decades and for most of that time has been manufacturing equipment to make animal feed pellets for the Irish and UK markets.
The company has been working with researchers in the universities of Umea, Sweden and Vienna, Austria for the past five years. “Essentially, it is about the specific properties of the wide range of potential woods for use in fuel pelletisation projects. We have unique expertise in the mechanical technology required but we needed to add the relevant wood science. That was to be found in countries with centuries of forestry product traditions.”
The overall result, according to founder and managing director Liam O'Connor, is a new integrated wood pellet production system that is designed to optimise the properties of the raw material in a processor/condenser unit prior to feeding it into a high-capacity pellet press. “Working together, these two patented units are more efficient than any wood fuel pellet production line available on the market today. The system meters the properties of the milled wood raw material and continuously adjusts the temperature and moisture to their optimum values for pelleting. The result is a much reduced specific power requirement compared with conventional systems. An output of 6 - 10 tonnes per hour of premium quality wood fuel is possible from a range of wood biomass inputs that extends from sustainable timber to chippings, shavings and sawdust.
“The new generation of machines will be built to order for specific customers such as forestry product plants and sawmills.”
The Kerry Biomass wood pelleting machines are designed and developed in its Killarney plant using Autodesk Inventor as the CAD system including 3D modelling and simulation. The first unit was assembled and fully tested in March. It stands six metres high and 3.5 metres long and is designed so that it can be stripped down again for shipping. “While this is our first new generation machine, calling it a prototype at this stage is a bit of a misnomer because we have simulated and tested it digitally using Autodesk Inventor over a period of close to 18 months,” explains Hugh O'Connor, the company design and production engineer and son of founder Liam.
“We started designing the prototype integrated machine in early 2008 and chose Autodesk Inventor as our CAD platform particularly because we knew we needed the 3D modelling capabilities. Also, much of the engineering design work on our previous generations of products had been done in AutoCAD.
Another factor was that we were conscious that we would be exchanging design data with a very wide range of component suppliers and sub-contract specialist manufacturers. In that context we were confident that Autodesk would offer the most universal software tools. “We were determined to take advantage of the smart Inventor simulation technology that allows us to test on-screen for any dimensional clashes and see how everything will work together.”
In developing the machine design, O'Connor and his team were building in special and standard components ranging from electric motors and hydraulic cylinders to high performance bearings. “We were actually quite familiar with perhaps 90% of the components or at least closely related products from the same suppliers over the years. That meant we could readily visualise them in the Inventor model, importing either AutoCAD files we already had or new 3D CAD files in .dxf format from the suppliers and adjusting the geometry of the model accordingly.”
Visualisation has been and continues to be important for Kerry Biomass in liaising with technology partners and in presenting the system to potential customers and relevant state agencies. Enlisting specialists Pixel Lab in Cork to produce an animated presentation showing exactly how the system works. The consultants simply imported jpeg images and other attribute data from the Inventor model as the basis for its video.
The time-saving utility Autodesk Vault accelerated the entire process by including the electronic specifications for a high proportion of the standard small components such as nuts, bolts and bearings. “We used SKF bearings exclusively, so any types that were not in Vault were readily downloaded from the SKF web site.”
Future developments are already in motion. “We are already well embarked on product improvements and refinements for the next model,” says Hugh O'Connor. “In a big mechanical system such as our product there is always plenty of scope for development and Inventor is the perfect CAD tool to design and simulate before making the decisions.”
