Bridge designers allow customers to assess models with COSMOSM

Company Mabey & Johnson Industry Civil Engineering Location U.K. Product Used COSMOSM™ Type of Analysis Linear Static, Frequency, Nonlinear, Advanced Dynamics More Details

The Challenge
The goal at Mabey & Johnson is to provide inexpensive and easily constructed bridge systems that could be taken anywhere in the world and built with minimum equipment as speedily as possible. Their applications have ranged from a permanent road bridge in New York to a temporary structure replacing a bridge lost to mountain floods in Nepal.

Although their experience and engineering know-how enable the engineers at Mabey & Johnson to predict likely structural responses to most situations, more accurate validation can only be achieved by testing a model. As Peter Tomlinson, Mabey & Johnson’s senior designer commented "Physical testing of a design can take several weeks and soak up considerable expense. And it doesn’t allow different configurations to be tested. We really needed a way to analyze our designs more efficiently."

The Solution
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) was the answer and COSMOSM running on a PC was the chosen solution. By using the parametric capabilities of COSMOSM, Peter Tomlinson’s team have parameterized their design configurations. For a particular customer query, a series of FEA models can now be created and analyzed automatically, simply by answering a few basic questions. Such capability makes thorough assessment of a range of solutions very simple, with minimal manual input.

The company’s adoption of FEA and COSMOSM has improved the efficiency and productivity of the bridge design process, and provided a quality of information that enables the ideal solution to be presented and justified to the customer.

Summary and Metrics:

• Able to model a bridge design in a matter of hours
• Parameterised design configurations for customer queries
• Improved the efficiency and productivity of the bridge design process