Americanmachinist 1689 11845csbks0600j00000005427
Americanmachinist 1689 11845csbks0600j00000005427
Americanmachinist 1689 11845csbks0600j00000005427
Americanmachinist 1689 11845csbks0600j00000005427
Americanmachinist 1689 11845csbks0600j00000005427

Software bridges design and manufacturing

Oct. 10, 2005
Greiner Vehicle Technology, a Germany-based designer of special transportation systems for moving large, heavy and awkward machinery via road and rail, took on the monumental task of transporting press systems, weighing as much as 300 ton, fro

Using OneSpace Designer Modeling software from CoCreate, Greiner concurrently manufactured parts of a vehicle for moving 300-ton presses over old, historic French bridges while the vehicle's overall design was still being completed.

Greiner Vehicle Technology, a Germany-based designer of special transportation systems for moving large, heavy and awkward machinery via road and rail, took on the monumental task of transporting press systems, weighing as much as 300 ton, from a port in Southern France to an Airbus A380 engine-manufacturing facility some 155 miles away. However, the real challenge was designing a vehicle that would manage press-weight distribution while crossing several old, historic French bridges without damaging or destroying those bridges.

With the help of OneSpace Designer Modeling software from CoCreate, Greiner concurrently manufactured vehicle parts at the same time it was completing the design. Any engineering changes made to the 3D design were transmitted quickly to all involved personnel because of the nonhistory-based methodology of CoCreate's software. "If we had used parametric (history-based) 3D modeling," says Jochen Sailer, technical designer at Greiner, "rapid design changes would have been impossible, and we did not have the time it would have taken to work back through a history-based 3D-feature system."

The vehicle, a wide-bed truck, has a mechanism that disperses loads to a series of steel beams installed along the length of a bridge. Beams can be shorter to cover one weakness in the bridge or where there are enough structural supports under the bridge. On the truck's bed, a supporting structure of cross beams hydraulically extends from both sides, and then hydraulic trolleys transfer loads from the truck itself onto the beams spanning the bridge.

Equipped with a pendulum system, the chassis of the supporting structure accommodates road/bridge inclines between two and five percent. The hydraulic trolleys automatically increase or decrease in height according to road slope to ensure loads remain stable and level. cocreate.com