Many engineering organizations today are facing major challenges when designing and delivering new products.
- Time to market as well as cost control are critical in an ever more competitive and global market.
- At the same time, system complexity is rising to accommodate growing customer expectations and increased regulatory constraints.
- However, key, sometimes fundamental design issues are often discovered late in the development process.
- This results in budget overruns and project delays, especially if issues are not discovered until hardware prototyping or even integration
- Moreover, once a system has been delivered and installed, failures and on-site service calls, can become very expensive and hurt your company’s bottom line.
Why is this so hard?
Many of these issues come about because design of a complex system involves several distinct groups, each focused on the development of one subsystem, using dedicated tools and methods to determine if their design will comply with the specifications for that system. Once these subsystems are integrated during prototyping, or even final assembly, problems arise.
For example, a stress analysis of a mechanical setup will provide us with data on structural integrity and failure points. However, in isolation, such an analysis can’t answer system-level questions on optimal sizing of actuators, stability of the selected control strategy or the impact of thermal management on the hydraulics.
MapleSim is our product for system-level simulation
It allows you to quickly build complex simulation models, by selecting and connecting components from a large library of pre-built components, covering a variety of domains like Mechanical, multibody, control, thermal, magnetics and hydraulics. We also offer specialized libraries for battery, driveline, advanced hydraulics and tire modeling.
It is important to note that, unlike traditional tools like Simulink, connections between components represent physical connections and not just signals flowing in one direction. This greatly simplifies the modeling task and dramatically reduces the complexity of the resulting block diagram.
Maple is our interactive environment for mathematical analysis and design exploration.
Maple allows you to go beyond simulation and get deep insight into your designs.
Over 5000 mathematical functions are ready to tackle problems like parameter tuning, optimization, Monte Carlo, sensitivity analysis, vibration analysis and linearization.
In addition, because at the core of Maple and MapleSim is a powerful engine for symbolic computing, you are able to extract system equations, compute symbolic Jacobians and get analytic solutions for inverse kinematics and dynamics.
The Maple document interface allows you to easily capture every step you take and the resulting interactive documents are easy to share, review, validate and re-use. These documents can even be shared on a server and are fully interactive within a web browser.
A full programming language allows you to script and automate analysis tasks but also allows you to define custom modeling components from first principles.
In all, Maple provides you with a very powerful environment for design exploration.
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- Tool-path planning
In close collaboration with FLSmidith’s designers and engineers, Maplesoft’s Application Engineering team contributed to the follow area:
Preliminary Hydraulic System for Skip Lifting System
Vibration Analysis of the controlled hydraulic
Skip Mechanical Design – Dynamic loading
Parameter study tool
Motion profile design tool
Automatic reporting on loading (hinges, footings)
Hydraulic system requirements (max flow rate, max pressure,…)
Overall system response (vibrations, load distribution, footing sinkage)
Parametric models to cover three size classes of the product
Continuous Update and Maintenance of the models in accordance with the design updates
Uneven Loading on Skips
Truck/Choke Impact Simulation
Production Notes:
Use pic_001.png
Speaker Notes:
Starting with the skip model, its geometry is fully parameterized in MapleSim which give the designers a straightforward way to check the design modifications from a dynamic standpoint.
The location of the eigenvalues on this plot is crucial as it indicates whether the system is stable or not. Eigenvalues on the right of the y axis indicate system instability and eigenvalues on the left of the y axis indicate stablility (*IMAGE*).
It was shown that the current design of the DTMS can exhibit unstable behaviours under certain circumstances.
An approach to perform stability analysis was developed.
Concept was demonstrated through a case study by varying feedback sensor location
Approach can be used for stability analysis in future projects
Based on an initial DEM simulation, the model in MapleSim captured the same load/motion profile. Further development resulted in a tool to adjust the loading to account for changes in the motion profile and the type of load (sticky/non-sticky load)
Maple and MapleSim are very powerful tools and enable a model-driven innovation process. In addition, Maplesoft has a lot of expertise in system-level modeling, design validation and HIL. We have worked with dozens of engineering organizations around the world to help them take advantage of modern techniques and tools to allow them to deal with growing complexity and to produce better designs, faster.
Our mission is to help make your engineering projects succeed
Maple and MapleSim are very powerful tools and enable a model-driven innovation process. In addition, Maplesoft has a lot of expertise in system-level modeling, design validation and HIL. We have worked with dozens of engineering organizations around the world to help them take advantage of modern techniques and tools to allow them to deal with growing complexity and to produce better designs, faster.
Our mission is to help make your engineering projects succeed
