COSMOS helps design log loading/stacking vehicle with 88,200 pound capacity

Company Tiger Engineering / Paradigm Product Development Industry Heavy Equipment Location Australia Product Used COSMOSWorks Type of Analysis Linear Static, Buckling More Details

The Challenge
Tiger Engineering, a heavy-vehicle manufacturer in Perth, Western Australia, identified a new target market - they wanted to develop a log loading/stacking vehicle with a capacity of 88,200 pounds. They contracted Paradigm Product Development to develop the vehicle. Time was of the essence: Paradigm had only 12 months to go from concept sketch to working prototype.

The Solution
The entire vehicle, with more than 1,300 three-dimensional components making up the vehicle assembly, was modeled in SolidWorks.

Running parallel with the development work was the accompanying analysis. Effective and accurate analysis was required to ensure that the vehicle and all of its sub-assemblies were capable of operating as required. Stress, deflection and buckling analyses needed to be performed on various vehicle components and concise output obtained. COSMOSWorks was adopted as the primary analysis tool.

COSMOSWorks was chosen mainly for its ease of use and simple interface with SolidWorks. The drag and drop study facility of the software, coupled with the attachment of COSMOSWorks' loads and restraints to the SolidWorks model, allowed Paradigm to quickly perform "what if" analysis with minimal changes.

Having COSMOSWorks embedded in the SolidWorks package interface gave a simple means of transferring from modeling to analysis. This effectively reduced the time spent on analysis for the project and gave more accurate and informative results than would have been achieved by manual methods.