Over the years, Bimba Manufacturing Co has expanded its business beyond its standard disposable pneumatic cylinders to encompass a high volume of "specials," custom products specifically designed for unique customer applications. Today, nearly half of Bimba''s business consists of custom-designed products. The company''s engineers migrated to the SolidWorks® 3D mechanical design system several years ago to increase productivity and throughput to meet Bimba''s growing product development needs.
Following its transition to 3D CAD, Bimba continued to rely on an extensive prototyping and testing program to engineer its products and validate design performance. However, after using 3D solid modeling for a year, Bimba''s engineers realized they could compress design cycles even further -- while improving design performance -- by implementing integrated design analysis software, according to project engineer William Teach.
"We were working on a project for over a year and suspected a potential problem, based on hand calculations," Teach recalls. "We needed to apply static stress analysis to study force distributions to complete the project, so we obtained an evaluation copy of COSMOSWorks® analysis software, which confirmed our suppositions. With COSMOSWorks, we verified the problem quickly and easily and launched the product without an extended prototyping cycle."
That experience convinced Bimba''s engineers to acquire COSMOSWorks software for conducting static stress analysis. "COSMOSWorks proved itself on that initial project," Teach explains. "We have since made the commitment to use COSMOSWorks analysis on the development of all new products."
Bimba chose COSMOSWorks software because of its ease-of-use and direct integration inside SolidWorks design software. The company has since added COSMOSMotion™ for kinematics analysis and COSMOSFloWorks™ for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis.
"COSMOS software is fully integrated," Teach says. "It''s like using the same software package with just another toolbar."
Shorter Design Cycles, Fewer Prototypes
Since implementing COSMOSWorks integrated analysis capabilities, Bimba has shortened its design cycles on average by 50% and reduced the number of prototypes required for physical testing by two-thirds.
"The benefits of using analysis have continued since that first project," Teach notes. "We worked on that project for over a year, and if we would have had COSMOSWorks from the beginning, we would have finished it in about six months. Using integrated analysis has helped us to cut our development cycles in half.
"We still have to do physical testing, but with COSMOSWorks we only need to develop one or two prototypes as opposed to developing prototypes for testing six, seven, or eight times," he adds.
Resolving Customer Challenges
In addition to compressing design cycles and reducing prototypes, COSMOS analysis software enables Bimba to resolve customer problems quickly. For example, a customer that produces food-processing equipment was experiencing frequent cylinder failures on a fruit-sorting machine. Picked fruit is placed on a conveyor, which carries it to the sorting machine, where a rod attached to the end of an actuator sorts the fruit, kicking out damaged or poorly-sized items.
"The bearing in the actuator was failing frequently, which necessitated shutting the machine down and switching out the actuator," Teach says. "With the customer''s inputs, we used COSMOSMotion to conduct a kinematics analysis to determine the impact load on the bearing. We discovered that the customer had increased the speed of the machine beyond the cylinder''s use specifications. The customer reduced the speed of the machine as a short-term solution, and we are developing a new cylinder that will perform at the faster speed.
"In the past, we would have had to duplicate the behavior in our model shop, which would have been more costly and time-consuming," he adds. "With COSMOSMotion, we were able to pinpoint the problem and resolve our customer''s problem in a matter of weeks."
More and more of Bimba''s customers are demanding a kinematics analysis to confirm their applications and have come to expect it, Teach notes.
Improved Product Quality
Bimba''s engineers also use COSMOS analysis software to improve product quality and performance on a continual basis. For example, the company uses COSMOSFloWorks to gain a greater understanding of the pressure differentials within its products.
"Product quality is much better when a product is designed and analyzed properly," Teach says. "With solid modeling and integrated COSMOS analysis, we are a lot more confident that our products will perform as designed."