Latest News August 2022

Welcome to the Frewer Engineering latest news August 2022.

This month’s edition reports on our investment into computing power, coding capabilities and cutting edge analysis techniques. We are also extending a special welcome to the latest addition to the Frewer team, Sam!

Shock & vibration analysis of customer equipment is a busy area for us

Our analysis team have been busy performing shock and vibration analysis on a variety of customer (mainly advanced electro-mechanical) equipment for both military and civil applications.
Simulating extreme events using our software tools, along with bespoke coding, we furnish our customers with life expectations of equipment along with predictions of performance in service under vibrational excitations.
Fatigue analysis plays an important part in the life predictions. Both low cycle and high cycle fatigue are considered along with the verification of avoid frequencies of equipment, where we typically utilise Campbell diagrams showing a summary of the avoided danger zones which enables our clients to predict in service performance.

Click here to read more about our advanced analysis capabilities

Future gas turbine test & development equipment design

Our advanced engineering team are busy working on future air vehichle gas turbine propulsion development to meet the needs of a greener environment by means of improved compressor and turbine internal aerodynamic performance. This is to facilitate new advanced blade shapes that provide higher performance and hence greener credentials.
The challenge is to design development equipment that can quickly be reconfigured to try out new ideas and hence break boundaries that took months to achieve results, rather than days!
The improved compressor performance test rig equipment is also anticipated to facilitate the development of new electric powered air vehicles too.
Our team are using CFD to optimise air flows to the equipment, along with our NX CAD design tools to create complex geometries and assemblies.

Click here to read more on our multi-discipline gas turbine design services

Python coding & process engineering modelling

Our engineering analysis team are developing a variety of bespoke software tools for use in support of our advanced engineering team and composites design team.
This involves the automation of what was once extremely complex EXCEL spreadsheet tools with the replacement of tools coded using Python and others.
Modelling of complex process plant and test rigs in support of fuel cell development is the main thrust of our activites here.
The tools also empower our composite design team with fast automations and optimisations allowing us create lighter structures for our clients.
Along with the above, our coders have been busy creating our own in house strain gauge positioning tools which allow us to place gauges in exactly the right location for applications such as equipment health monitoring.
Our YouTube channel has a number of videos which the reader may find interesting!

Click here to check out our new videos on our YouTube channel

Welcome to our newest team member

The team extend a warm welcome to Sam Szeto this month. Sam joins us from the University of Bristol where he studied Aerospace Engineering. Sam has been extensively involved in the University’s Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) design, build and test projects, for which he was the lead engineer for mechanism actuation and control. Sam has particular skills in design, computing, mathematical modelling, thermodynamics and aerodynamics. As such Sam is ideally placed to support our large compressor and turbine rig design projects, as well as our other ongoing design and analysis projects.

Find out more about us

Composites – new adhesive modelling techniques will allow metallic co-bonded and glued inserts to be more reliably modelled.

Frewer Engineering has recently been implementing more advanced bonded joint Finite Element Modelling techniques. This methodology, originally developed by NASA, utilises rigid element and spring type elements. Although we have had the capability to simulate bonded joints and recover stresses and strains in the past, this methodology adds more fidelity to complex bonded joint arrangements by considering element areas, shear and tensile moduli, and thicknesses of the bonded joint, which can be used to calculate spring constant inputs. Then, during post-processing, detailed forces can be recovered from the elements, leading to more accurate stress and strain interpretations at the joint. The main benefit of this is more accurate displacement and stress behaviour, leading to a better represented simulation, which in turn leads to more reliable adhesive stresses.

Click here for more on our advanced composite design capabilities

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) gets a boost!

Our CFD team are busy using both of our preferred software tools, Star CCM and SC Flow to analyse a number fo complex customer problems.
Refining and optimising geometries to reduce wake (noise) and drag is a busy area in both the military and civil arenas.
Optimising air flow shapes to provide cleaner air presentation to gas turbine test equipment is busy.
Modelling of Hydrogen bubble flows in process plant is another busy area too.
Our CFD team will be benefitting from our latest investment announcement (see below) in computing hardware that enables the bi wiring of computers along with faster switches (bottlenecks) – giving much faster analysis run times for large and complex CFD models.

Check out our CFD services here

Our hot nozzle structure design nears completion of manufacture

Our engineers have spent the last couple of years working on the design of advanced hot nozzle to facilitate ground testing of a new large civil aero engine. The nozzle is capable of ducting very high temperatures along with possessing the correct natural frequencies to avoid excitations and provides our customer with an essential requirement for tightly controlled nozzle through areas. This is essential to achieving the correct back pressure on a ground test gas turbine assembly. Shown here is the main structure in its tooling being CNC machined – virtual completed!

Check out our gas turbine development design activites here

Marine defence team update

Maritime defence both surface and sub surface remain an important back bone of our business and we are pleased to report that this arena is continuing to grow.
At time of writing we are active in the design of complex carbon fiber structures with challenging weight optimisation requirements.
The modelling of complex electro-mechanical assemblies for shock and vibration continues along with a number of advanced CFD modelling scenarios to reduce wakes, noise and vibrations.
Our defence team are also using Dytran to model heavily non linear events such as impact and resulting damage too!

Take a look at our advanced analysis services

More computing power is being introduced

As ever, our customers challenges require faster computing power to solve ever growing complex models in both CFD and FEA analysis arenas. Rising to meet this challenge we are investing heavily in new computing power and we would like to thank our local government grant assistance team in supporting us with this costly investment! Essentially we are making the next stage of upgrade to our systems. Recently we switched all our intranet to the fastest CAT 6 cabling (buried beneath our floors). To capitalise on this our new investments in servers and switches and the ability to bi wire our workstations, gives us an immense speed increase. Our customers will benefit from our ability to solve larger models where we can simulate events that would normally cost a fortune to physically test.