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Dräger Medical cuts its design time in half
with COSMOS
Company
Dräger
Medical |
Industry
Medical |
Location
Germany |
Product Used
COSMOSWorks™, COSMOSFloWorks™ |
Type of Analysis
Linear Static,
Thermal, Fluid Flow |
More Details
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With the goal to reduce product development
time by fifty percent, DrÃger Medical uses COSMOS
to analyse its designs and reduce the number of physical
prototypes.
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The Challenge
Dräger Medical is one
of the world's leading manufacturers of breathing and anesthetic equipment
for operating rooms, intensive care units, and ambulances. The 80-person
engineering staff at the company's Lubek, Germany, headquarters handles
new product designs and ongoing modifications to more than 70 existing
products, including ventilators, anesthetic systems, incubators for
transporting premature infants, and gas and oxygen piping systems for
hospital units.
The company's longtime system of testing
by building physical prototypes and sending analysis work to outside
labs throughout the design process was thorough and accurate, but also
slow and expensive. It took Dräger an average of four years to
bring a new product to market. Facing intense pressure from competitors,
Dräger's board of directors ordered the company to cut its design
time in half.
The Solution
The company decided to replace as much physical prototyping as
possible by integrating COSMOSWorks and COSMOSFloWorks analysis software
with its 80 seats of SolidWorks® three dimensional computer-aided
design (3D CAD) software. The COSMOS products enable Dräger's engineers
to simulate their designs' mechanical behavior and physical properties
before building time-consuming physical prototypes. Dräger chose
COSMOS because of its tight integration with SolidWorks.
Summary and Metrics:
- COSMOS cut testing time for Dräger's new and redesigned products
by an average of 50 percent.
- Before COSMOS, the typical design process included eight physical
prototypes and outsourcing dozens of finite element analysis (FEA)
calculations to verify design parameters. Now Dräger averages
two prototypes per project.
- COSMOS paid for itself in one project. COSMOSWorks performed in
two days a calculation that previously took an outsource lab three
months to complete and cost $26,000.
- Early in the design process, COSMOSFloWorks identified a flaw that
engineers would not otherwise have discovered until expensive physical
prototyping, saving $1,600 on each prototype.
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"Using
COSMOSWorks means that we can run calculations on the various
design approaches during the design stage easily and quickly.
We can then compare them against one another. Otherwise, we
would have to either send the calculation work outside or build
real prototypes so that we can carry out precise measurements.
Both options are expensive and time consuming. COSMOS saves
us that time and expense."
Karsten Hoffman, Dräger project leader
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