Latest News December 2020

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Welcome to Frewer Engineering’s Latest News December 2020.

As we come to the end of what has been an interesting and challenging year for all, take a look at our plans for 2021 as well as an update on our new and on-going projects.

We hope you enjoy the read.

CFD & Advanced Analysis

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Frewers have won a key initial contract in support of the heritage new build of Sir Nigel Gresley’s P2 ‘Mikado’ – 2007 Prince of Wales. Our initial involvement centres on the flow optimisation of the Cylinder Block, which has been upgraded from cast material to a plate steel fabrication.

The cylinders will run at a higher pressure than the original, with larger bore supply pipes and modern materials – this may just be the most powerful version of the UK’s most powerful passenger steam locomotive.

Built for traction more than top speed, the P2 is expected to haul in excess of 600 tonnes, for steam rail-tours through the steep railways of Scotland, as originally intended by Gresley. Frewer Engineering are proud to be supporting this latest endeavour by the A1 Steam Locomotive Trust – https://www.p2steam.com/

Click here to read more on our CFD capabilities

Gas Turbine Test Equipment

The team have recently reached a significant design milestone for a test rig used to assess blade integrity of an upcoming flagship aero engine. With planned rotation velocities of over 40 revolutions a second, the centrifugal forces the new rig has to withstand are equivalent to the instantaneous force of dropping three fully grown blue whales simultaneously. Careful material selection and geometric optimisation have been paramount in achieving success. Our design and analysis team have used topology optimisation on multiple components to rapidly converge on a solution that not only meets structural safety factors but keeps overall mass to a minimum.

Based on our analysis, our collaborating manufacturers are now set to purchase the necessary forgings, while we finalise the design. Working in this concurrent way ensures that collectively we can deliver the final test rig to the end customer allowing their testing to commence on schedule.

Earlier in the year we successfully passed the critical design review of an aero-engine slave pylon to enable ground testing of the same engine platform mentioned above. Initial cutting of metal is now complete and fabrication of the main hardback structures is well underway at facilities in the North West of England.

Click here to read more on our Advanced Engineering capabilities

Marine Defence

Our marine defence team are working against the clock to deliver important structural designs for our customer in the field of light weighting of submarine equipment. One of the challenges here is to bond carbon fiber structures to large Titanium Alloy components to give high integrity to resist large bending & shock loads. Our design solution involves the incorporation of locking features on the metallic components which create large areas for shear resistance. The above coupled with advanced pre-treatment of the Titanium Alloy allows this complex assembly to achieve high structural integrity.

Click here to read more on our Marine Defence capabilities

Advanced Composites

Our composites team are busy developing their design tools in the field of lay-up optimisation and refining of strength predictions of lay-ups prior to coupon testing being performed. This reduces the risk in any composite project, as launching from design into an expensive testing program only to find that the assumed material strength and stiffness values are inaccurate can cause a great deal of cost and time delays.

The team are also developing their qualification planning capabilities for aerospace composite structures. Some of the teams designs are now in manufacture with two organisations and ensuring “design for manufacture” is achieved is critical to ensure a reliable manufacturing process along with a working product for the end customer.

Click here to read more on our Composites capabilities

Business Update

Frewer Engineering is undertaking interviews and finalising placement opportunities to provide an ongoing recruitment pipeline and manage our springboard into Q1 next year. Our marketing team is currently designing a new web site which will go live early in the new year. This upgrade to our site will improve the performance and look leading to better user experience, watch out for our January newsletter in which the new site is sure to feature!

As reported in our last newsletter, considerable investment is currently under way in IT and software tools and we can now report that our new servers and NAS drive back up system are now fully functional. This will give our customer even greater assurance of data handling and storage by us. At the time of writing, nearly all our staff are on training courses of one kind or another. The courses are mainly aimed at providing improved project management for our customers so we hope this will be noticed in 2021!

We are continuing to provide full turn-key engineering solutions within and across our newly created divisions. For further information on these divisions follow the links below:

Advanced Engineering Division
Advanced Composites Division
Advanced Analysis Division

Click here to read more on our business

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