GKN Revolves Around Aerospace Calculations
3 March, 2008
GKN Aerospace Engineering Services Pty Ltd, Australia’s leading aerospace design services organisation, offers a full range of engineering and design services to the aerospace and defence markets. Engineers provide calculations and designs of structures for customers aimed at ensuring safety, performance and manufacturability. These services range from the supply of engineers to the execution of complete design packages.
GKN Aerospace Engineering Services needed an engineering calculation environment that could combine the simplicity of a word processor with visual diagrams of equations, so customers could comprehend design principles and make amendments to calculations if required during development.
Mathcad is a visual design environment that allows engineers from all industries to draw from a variety of data sources during the design phase of a product and document all mathematical formulas and calculations.
Mathcad version 14 is used at GKN Aerospace Engineering Services by stress engineers, who produce calculations and product designs that are provided to customers to ensure designs meet performance requirements and calculations are free of errors. A key element of this process is the ability to capture the rationale of complicated equations.
Mathcad allows engineers at GKN to provide hard-copy calculation sheets, as well as digital copy files that can be shared with customers. GKN's customers benefit from Mathcad digital files, because information can be transferred easily and calculations can be modified if needed.
The hard copy is critical in the aerospace industry as it forms a part of contract documents and in all cases it is inspected by a validation organisation, such as, the Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority. Once the analysis is complete, the second phase is to validate the calculation to make sure there are no errors. This involves complete recalculation to validate the original analysis.
Mathcad has also saved time on training programs. Graduates coming into the company bring the knowledge of how to use it with them, as Mathcad is used extensively in universities.
"We greatly benefit from the ease of formulating industry-standard stress analysis; the literal viewing of formulae; explicit unit management (which is especially useful when moving between projects, e.g., from a European SI-based system to a US Imperial-based system); the ability to vectorise calculations to encompass a range of different load cases; the ability to interface with other applications, such as MS Excel; and the capability to form simple iterative solutions to problems that previously were solved using cumbersome graphical methods. " - Australian Engineers, GKN Aerospace Engineering Services Pty Ltd.
All Mathcad licensing and support for GKN Aerospace Engineering Services Pty Ltd is handled by Hearne Scientific Software Pty Ltd.
About GKN Aerospace Engineering Services
GKN Aerospace Engineering Services (GKNAES) opened in Australia on 1st August 2001 to service the global demand for engineering services in the aerospace and defence industries. Headquartered in the aerospace precinct of Fisherman's Bend in Port Melbourne and with engineering offices in Sydney and Brisbane, the Australian operation has undergone strong growth since inception and total staffing now exceeds 220 people. GKNAES is part of GKN Aerospace, a global company with $2bn in annual revenue and over 7,500 employees. www.gknaerospace.com
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