Revetec case study

Industrial machinery and heavy equipment
Revetec
Revolutionary engine was designed and built in less than six months
Product
Solid Edge
Business initiatives
New product development
Business challenges
Sell OEMs on a revolutionary
engine concept that addresses
critical environmental and
economic concerns
Impress a potential customer
by demonstrating a working
model sooner than expected
Keys to success
A full design of the entire
engine
In-house stress analysis of
critical components
Photorealistic renderings
of the engine created from
CAD data
Results
Two-week analysis process
reduced to 30 minutes
Savings of $1,000 to $2,000
per analysis
Solid modeling with integrated
stress analysis was instrumental
in developing an engine
that is smaller, cleaner
and more powerful than
conventional models
Rethinking the internal
combustion engine
In 1995, Bradley Howell-Smith designed
and patented a radically different internal
combustion engine. He called his concept
the “Controlled Combustion Engine” (CCE)
and formed Revetec Holdings, Ltd. to bring
the new engine to market – to the entire
market currently served by conventional
combustion engines. “The advantages
of Revetec’s engine technology can be
applied to most internal and external combustion engine applications,” Howell-Smith
explains. “It can be used in motor vehicles,
trucks, buses, motorcycles, pumps and
generators and light aircraft engines as
well as diesel and marine engines.”
www.siemens.com/solidedge
Results (continued)
Faster analysis process allows
time to improve overall
engine design
A 300-component engine was
designed and built in less than
seven months
What are the advantages of the CCE? One
is greater torque, which is what drives the
vehicle. Howell-Smith’s engine design
consists of two counter-rotating “trilobate”
(three lobed) cams geared together, so
both cams contribute to forward motion.
This design has a higher bottom-end
mechanical advantage over equivalent
conventional engines (87 percent for the
CCE versus 64 percent for the conventional
engine). The design increases overall
engine efficiency, making the engine
significantly more fuel-efficient than a
conventional engine, with increased
power/torque ratios. It produces fewer
emissions and is also smaller, lighter and
less expensive to manufacture.
Small in size but big in accomplishment
In July 2006 while evaluating the needs
of the aircraft industry, Howell-Smith
conceived of a variation on his original
design. Called the X4, the new design
would reduce the size of the engine to
approximately 50 percent of most engines
of similar capacity and the weight to about
half. The concept was enthusiastically
received by certain OEMs and HowellSmith’s challenge was to take the idea
from concept to working prototype in just
seven months. “We had a company coming
to see us in February, 2007,” he explains.
“They weren’t expecting to see a working
model by that time but we wanted to
impress them with what we could do.”
“We” is really only two people. Brad
Howell-Smith does the design work and
Paul Moitzi, a machinist builds the
prototype engines. One big reason they
accomplish as much as they do, as quickly
as they do, is the use of Solid Edge® design
software. Howell-Smith chose this CAD
system back when he started Revetec and
has been using it ever since. “Before then,
I had never touched a CAD package,” he
says. “I needed something I could learn
quickly. Within two weeks of buying
Solid Edge, I had most of the major
features down and I was modeling
engine components.” Over the years, he
has used the software to create digital
component models, from which he
builds subassemblies and then evaluation
models of entire engines.
Integrated analysis improves the design
Howell-Smith continued to upgrade Solid
Edge as new releases became available.
When he started work on the X4 engine,
the current release of Solid Edge included
Femap Express structural analysis software. Prior to this, Howell-Smith hired
an outside contractor to perform finite element analyses. This was less than ideal
because it didn’t allow for multiple designanalysis iterations. “They told me, ‘Yes, this
part will pass,’ or ‘You’ve got a problem
in this area,’ but each time I changed the
design and sent it back for analysis, it took
about two weeks.”
Obviously, that wasn’t going to work if
Howell-Smith was going to meet his selfimposed time frame for the X4 prototype.
He decided he would see if he could use
Femap™ software to do the structural
analysis himself. The ease of use pleasantly surprised him. “I opened a Solid Edge
Solutions/Services
Solid Edge
www.siemens.com/solidedge
Customer’s primary business
Revetec Holdings, Ltd. is a
world-class design engine
company and developer of
the Controlled Combustion
Engine.
www.revetec.com
Customer location
Gold Coast, Queensland
Australia
piston model and the software asked me
where I wanted to put the loads,” he
explains. “I entered the location (the top of
piston) and the amount of the load. Then
it asked where the design was constrained
so I put in that, along with the material
associated with the part. Then I clicked
‘Analyze.’ It was really that easy.” Now,
what used to be a two-week process is
done in half an hour.
Looking good is part of the benefit
Being able to do analysis in house has
enabled Howell-Smith to save the $1,000
to $2,000/analysis the contractor was
charging. More importantly, it lets him
perform more analyses and use analysis
results to optimize his designs. “On the X4,
because analysis is integrated with Solid
Edge and it can be done so quickly, I was
able to analyze certain components that I
wouldn’t have analyzed in the past,” says
Howell-Smith. “And overall the design is
better because of the ability to do this.
In fact, I brought some old models back
into Solid Edge and checked out some
of the areas where we’d outsourced the
analysis. Using Femap I was able to
remove about half the weight while making the parts stronger. I wish I’d had this
capability earlier.”
Howell-Smith started designing the X4 on
July 10, 2006 and finished modeling the
entire engine before the end of the year.
He figures the Solid Edge work took him
about 1,000 hours, which includes all the
analysis. The prototype is now built and
is currently being set up on the dyno for
initial tests and tuning.
There’s another aspect of Solid Edge that
Howell-Smith has come to rely on in his
efforts to sell his engine – the ability to
produce highly realistic-looking images
from CAD data. “We are a small operation
but we like to have people see us as a
larger operation than we are. I find the
rendering capability in Solid Edge very
useful for this,” Howell-Smith says.
“With Solid Edge, I generate very attractive
marketing materials. In fact, I have had
the experience of showing some of
these high resolution images to people
and having them say, ‘I didn’t realize
you’d built the engine already.’ They
didn’t realize they were looking at a
computer rendering.”
“Because analysis is integrated with Solid
Edge and it can be done so quickly, I was
able to analyze certain components that
I wouldn’t have analyzed in the past.”
Bradley Howell-Smith
Chairman
Revetec Holdings, Ltd.
Siemens PLM Software
Americas
+1 314 264 8287
Europe
+44 (0) 1276 413200
Asia-Pacific +852 2230 3308
www.siemens.com/plm
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