Mechanical Engineering
Computer Aided Engineering
From concept design through to detailed drawings for part procurement and manufacture, 3D Computer Aided Design is employed within a Product Data Management (PDM) based system to ensure cradle-to-grave traceability of project data. This system is strongly linked to the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) tools employed to achieve optimal designs. Our design skills are underpinned by our in depth materials engineering capability, ensuring integrity of property data and its interpretation.
Rapid Component Development
This expertise in engineering design, analysis and materials selection enables capability for rapid component manufacture in metals, plastics and composites with potential for novel solutions to both functional and manufacturing problems.
Rapid component development is achieved by exploiting class leading software; our own in-house facilities for hardware generation; and by collaborations with leading industrial and academic partners. This enables Conekt to exploit the latest advances in rapid prototype technologies and secondary processes, such as composite tool manufacture.
Finite Element Analysis
Skills employed in design based activities can be used in problem solving where FEA models can reveal issues that would require expensive and time consuming testing. In particular, the use of FEA to shortlist the most favourable variants to test, can substantially reduce test effort and allow implementation of appropriate instrumentation to track test data against model predictions as it evolves. This also facilitates effective integration of test fixture design into the test process.
ANSYS software enables us to perform structural linear or nonlinear and dynamic analyses throughout the design process. The ability to perform additional thermal analysis and coupled-physics design studies allows our designers to analyse mechatronic products and the interactions between the different physics applying to the parts.
Original Design
It is often necessary to originate a design concept from internally generated customer criteria to provide a solution that offers improved functionality, advanced performance and novel capability. This is facilitated by combining our substantial experience gained in many industrial sectors. Cross-over also takes place with our analytical and design tools to obtain genuinely novel solutions to design problems. Involvement in problem solving and use of FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) and PFMEA (Process Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) approaches ensures design and manufacturing solutions are both robust and cost effective.
Value Analysis Tear-down
TRW Conekt provides competitor benchmarking facilities, value added analysis, Intellectual Property Rights positioning and dissemination services. Using our automotive and aerospace control systems knowledge along with motor, sensor, electronic, reliability and mechanical skills, Conekt is able to provide the complete tear down service.
Plastic Moulding Modelling
Plastic part design requires an integrated approach to design of the part, the moulding tool and the moulding process to be fully successful. This is best achieved by use of highly coupled Finite Element based tools, such as ANSYS and Moldflow, as used by Conekt, employing common CAD geometries for maximum fidelity. Converting existing metallic designs to plastic is a typical application of this approach. These tools and analytical strategies can also be employed in problem solving with plastic components.
For more information about any of Conekt’s consultancy services, please contact us.
