Latest News December 2022

Season’s greetings and welcome to the Frewer Engineering latest news December 2022.

 

In this issue we report on some exciting project updates as well as our latest staff developments and a touch of festive cheer.
We hope you enjoy the read!

 

Merry Christmas!

Christmas-Church

We would like to wish all our customers, suppliers and followers a very Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and prosperous 2023! 2022 has been yet another interesting year, our business restructure saw noticeably increased agility and efficiency for our customers and continued investment in our team has seen our technical offering, in particular CFD and thermal analysis, boosted to new highs. It has been a pleasure working with existing clients as well as forming new relationships and we look forward to continuing these relationships whilst building new ones in the new year. 

UltraFan® Pylon Unveiling

UltraFan® Pylon Unveiling

The team at Frewer Engineering have been celebrating this week, following the unveiling of the Rolls-Royce UltraFan® Engine demonstrator successfully installed inside Testbed 80. We are immensely proud to support this programme, having designed a brand-new Pylon architecture for use on the planned global test campaign. This project was a great example of using many of Frewer Engineering’s specialisms all on one project; from structural analysis of the primary hardback structure through to the design and analysis of lightweight composite aerosurfaces. This was all made possible thanks to the world class manufacturing provided by the Hyde Group.

The UltraFan® Engine will offer step changes in fuel efficiency compared with legacy designs and will be capable of running on 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel. Frewer Engineering are committed to net zero aviation and are proud to support Rolls-Royce in their aspirational endeavours.

Composite Materials Lightweight Design

Gibbs-Amphitruck<br />

Frewer Engineering has significant history of structural design in composite materials, particularly aimed at lightweight design for the transportation sector. This work ranges from replacing legacy metallic parts with carbon composites, to manage Centre-of-Gravity (CofG) issues in submarines, through to the detailed design of foam and hex-core sandwich panels for the marine and automotive sectors.

The example pictured here is the foam sandwich panel hull-form of the Gibbs Humdinga Amphitruck Amphibious Vehicle – a highly capable vehicle popular with the special forces. Frewer Engineering carried out the structural analysis of the hull-form and water jet tunnel structures around the transom, generating the structural justification for the vessel.

Gas Turbine Facility Site Visit

Whittle Laboratory Visit

Nothing beats seeing projects in person to get a sense of scale when it comes to gas turbine rig design! This month, our team have been continuing the design of a new high-speed gas-turbine rig for the Whittle Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. To aid the design process and learn about legacy designs, some of the team went to visit the Whittle Laboratory on site to see their existing rigs. The impressive suite of existing rigs provided invaluable research and understanding as to key design drivers and aided discussions around accessibility and assembly.

At Frewer Engineering we offer a range of capabilities when it comes to high-speed rotating rig design. This ranges from turn-key solutions to individual packages of work around pressure vessels, high speed rotatives, rotordynamics, advanced CFD, thermal-structural analysis and much more.

Another of our Engineers Achieves Chartership

Chartered Engineer

Daniel Green is the most recent to join our cohort of talented Chartered Engineers within the business, having been elected as a Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (MIMechE) in late November 2022. Achieving Chartership and professional accreditation, supporting our Engineering Institutions, and maintaining our Continuous Professional Development (CPD), is an important part of life and work at Frewer Engineering; coaching and mentoring our engineers to become future leaders in the profession.

We trust that the wider readership of our newsletter will join us in congratulating Dan on this significant achievement, and we wish him the very best in his continuing key role as a Lead Engineer for our business.

Hinkley Point C Visit and Sustainability

Carbon Neutral

Two of our engineers recently took a trip to Hinkley Point C (HPC) to learn more about the site and scale of the work that is being taken on in Somerset. They learned much about the details of the nuclear work but also the complexity of the logistical challenges involved with such a large task. HPC is crucial for the UK in achieving carbon neutral targets and here at Frewer we are doing our bit in the race for a greener future. Sustainability is one of our core values, from powering our office with solar and biomass to considering environmental impacts in our design work. Coincidentally the HPC trip allowed our engineers to gain better understanding of heavy lift equipment, which was utilised on a renewable energy storage project.

Another of Our Designs Brought to Life

Steam Train Drawing

Frewer Engineering have played a key role in supporting the heritage new-build of Sir Nigel Gresley’s P2 ‘Mikado’ – the 2007 Prince of Wales – the UK’s most powerful passenger steam locomotive. Our involvement centred on flow optimisation of the Cylinder Block, upgrading from a cast design to a plate steel fabrication and checking flow through the Lentz double-beat valves and steam passageways to reduce losses.

We’re pleased to report, via the Steam Trust, that the manufacture of the cylinder block has now been completed and delivered to Darlington for assembly into the main chassis of the locomotive. Always good to see hardware come to life, brought to reality from the 3D CAD files we become so familiar with.

Pencil and ink drawing by Director of Engineering, Simon Apsley – ‘P2 in Apple Green’

Supersonic Santa!

Supersonic Santa!

And finally for one of our more unusual customers, a certain gift delivery service wanted to understand how they could improve efficiencies, given their extremely tight timescales. Our CFD and thermal team have risen to the challenge, using our advanced analysis tools to run a steady state supersonic compressible flow simulation. The above plot showing the extreme temperatures that the delivery vehicle experiences at the supersonic speeds required to meet delivery targets. CFD and thermal analysis is not just for Christmas, our team are well versed in these type of assessments for a multitude of applications, feeding efficiently into design optimisation to meet our client’s needs.

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