Virtual testing with COSMOSMotion solves big problem at small company

Company Ward Machine Tool Industry Machinery Location U.S.A Product Used COSMOSMotion™ Type of Analysis Motion Simulation More Details

The Challenge
A one-engineer machine shop in Fowlerville, Michigan, USA, Ward Machine Tool specializes in the design and manufacturing of standard and custom lathe chucks for the aluminum wheel market, rotary actuators, and specialty machining fixtures.

Ward Machine Tool needed to know if a custom design of a lathe chuck was going to work before they committed to manufacturing. The customer required a dual-actuated/multi-range aluminum wheel lathe chuck and a duplex rotary actuator to accommodate the design.

"We were a little hesitant as to whether or not the new design would work," says Bruce Emerson, Engineering Manager at Ward Machine Tool. But how do you validate a design that has never been built before? The Ward engineer anticipated design rework so a build and test approach was considered too expensive.

The Solution
Ward Machine Tool decided to leverage their investment in their SolidWorks CAD software by adding virtual testing tools. They decided to extend their CAD environment by including COSMOSMotion.

Rather than building the chuck and actuator and testing it using trial and error, Ward Machine Tool extracted the same physical data right from the SolidWorks interface by using COSMOSMotion as a virtual testing tool.

In all, Ward was able to design their model, test it, and optimize it on the computer, before any metal was cut. The end result was large savings in time, effort, and cost associated with what would have been a costly effort.

Summary and Metrics:

• Estimated $45,000 cost savings by helping identify where the new design might fail.
• Integration with SolidWorks helped find out faster that design would not work, saving time and money.
• Reduced physical testing time to 1/10th.