COSMOSDesignSTAR helps reduce deign of food machinery from five months to five weeks

Company Casa Herrera Industry Machinery Location U.S.A. Product Used COSMOSDesignSTAR™ Type of Analysis Linear Static More Details

The Challenge
Casa Herrera designs and manufactures machinery that processes flour and corn food products such as tortillas and corn chips. With 100+ employees, the company makes everything from individual machines to entire automated assembly lines. A national brand tortilla chip manufacturer uses equipment supplied by Casa Herrera to make tortilla chips. In addition, national restaurants also use Casa Herrera machinery.

Mechanical design engineers at Casa Herrera had been using a 2D CAD package for many years when the company decided it needed to upgrade to a new CAD system that could increase production and limit scrap. For a typical five-bend sheet metal part, such as the side guard for a machine, it took an employee an entire day to recreate and unfold the part, mostly working with pencil and paper, and generate the drawings with their CAD package.

The Solution
A decision was made to convert to solid modeling using Solid Edge and to further enhance their design modeling with COSMOSDesignSTAR from Structural Research & Analysis Corporation.

Using COSMOSDesignSTAR in their design analysis, the critical forces of machine components such as the roller on a sheeter head can be calculated in 30 minutes. This complex analysis would have taken a senior engineer two weeks in the past.

Summary and Metrics:

• Design of deep fryer reduced from 5 months to 5 weeks
• Reduced time to increase or decrease the size of an existing machine from 2 to 3 weeks to 2 to 3 days
• Critical forces of machine components such as the roller on a sheeter head calculated in 30 minutes instead of 2 weeks