FEATURES A digital process lets designers and engineers cope with new complexity in manufacturing and design, and integrating sensors, ac tuators. GPS trackers and other electronic components in oil and gas equipment is becoming more common; that means generating wiring diagrams and schematics as part of the design. At the other ex treme, designs need to include frames and fabricated struc tures around the equipment; testing those for safet y in advance, down the placing of the weldments, through structural analysis in a digital environment, instead of over-engineering them saves both time and money. Manufacturers don’t just deliver designs and physical equipment; they also need to create installation, assembly and maintenance documentation. With a digital process, you can create those from the same digital assets, which is faster and more accurate. Just laying o u t co m p o n e nt s a n d ro u t i n g p i p e s in a 2D drawing doesn’t give enough Moving to 3D Solid Edge from 2D, designers at AESEAL cut complex design of mechanical from 2 to 3 days down to half an information to fit equipment into the hour. By digitising their designs, manual calculations for machine tool programming are reduced or eliminated. available space in a plant; engineers can Switching from 2D to 3D CAD meant designers at AESSEAL could finish produce pipe runs in and generate 3D projections – or installers can look the complicated details in the design of a mechanical seal in half an at 3D diagrams on site using mobile viewers. hour rather than the two to three days it used to take, and then waiting yet another day for manual calculations needed to reprogram machine Product customisation is becoming more common in the industry, and tools to make the par ts. AESSEAL can send 3D designs to its casting manual processes for complex custom products lead to bottlenecks in suppliers in a format they can work with directly. But it also meant delivering both quotes and orders. Manufacturers who create custom that for the first time, the company could show customers cutaways hardware that’s engineered-to- order, covering thousands of design and animated models of what they were actually buying; the hundreds elements, to fit into the customer’s specific environment and processes, of precision engineered par ts inside the seal, not just the anonymous and designed to the customer’s specifications, depend even more on a strong digital process. metal casing protecting those par ts.
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Offshore World | 18 | February-March 2019