ProductSolid Edge

Business initiativesNew product development

Business challengesSell OEMs on a revolutionary engine concept that addresses critical environmental and economic concernsImpress a potential customer by demonstrating a working model sooner than expected

Keys to successA full design of the entire engine In-house stress analysis of critical components Photorealistic renderings of the engine created from CAD data

ResultsTwo-week analysis process reduced to 30 minutesSavings of $1,000 to $2,000 per analysis

Solid modeling with integrated stress analysis was instrumental in developing an engine that is smaller, cleaner and more powerful than conventional models

Rethinking the internal combustion engineIn 1995, Bradley Howell-Smith designed and patented a radically different internal combustion engine. He called his concept

Industrial machinery and heavy equipment

www.siemens.com/solidedge

Revetec Revolutionary engine was designed and built in less than six months

the “Controlled Combustion Engine” (CCE) and formed Revetec Holdings, Ltd. to bring the new engine to market – to the entire market currently served by conventional combustion engines. “The advantages of Revetec’s engine technology can be applied to most internal and external com-bustion engine applications,” Howell-Smith explains. “It can be used in motor vehicles, trucks, buses, motorcycles, pumps and generators and light aircraft engines as well as diesel and marine engines.”

What are the advantages of the CCE? One is greater torque, which is what drives the vehicle. Howell-Smith’s engine design consists of two counter-rotating “trilobate” (three lobed) cams geared together, so both cams contribute to forward motion. This design has a higher bottom-end mechanical advantage over equivalent conventional engines (87 percent for the CCE versus 64 percent for the conventional engine). The design increases overall engine efficiency, making the engine significantly more fuel-efficient than a conventional engine, with increased power/torque ratios. It produces fewer emissions and is also smaller, lighter and less expensive to manufacture.

Small in size but big in accomplishmentIn July 2006 while evaluating the needs of the aircraft industry, Howell-Smith conceived of a variation on his original design. Called the X4, the new design would reduce the size of the engine to approximately 50 percent of most engines of similar capacity and the weight to about half. The concept was enthusiastically received by certain OEMs and Howell-Smith’s challenge was to take the idea from concept to working prototype in just seven months. “We had a company coming to see us in February, 2007,” he explains. “They weren’t expecting to see a working model by that time but we wanted to impress them with what we could do.”

“We” is really only two people. Brad Howell-Smith does the design work and Paul Moitzi, a machinist builds the prototype engines. One big reason they accomplish as much as they do, as quickly as they do, is the use of Solid Edge® design software. Howell-Smith chose this CAD system back when he started Revetec and has been using it ever since. “Before then, I had never touched a CAD package,” he

Results (continued)Faster analysis process allows time to improve overall engine designA 300-component engine was designed and built in less than seven months

says. “I needed something I could learn quickly. Within two weeks of buying Solid Edge, I had most of the major features down and I was modeling engine components.” Over the years, he has used the software to create digital component models, from which he builds subassemblies and then evaluation models of entire engines.

Integrated analysis improves the design Howell-Smith continued to upgrade Solid Edge as new releases became available.When he started work on the X4 engine, the current release of Solid Edge included Femap Express structural analysis soft-ware. Prior to this, Howell-Smith hired an outside contractor to perform finite ele-ment analyses. This was less than ideal because it didn’t allow for multiple design-analysis iterations. “They told me, ‘Yes, this part will pass,’ or ‘You’ve got a problem in this area,’ but each time I changed the design and sent it back for analysis, it took about two weeks.”

Obviously, that wasn’t going to work if Howell-Smith was going to meet his self-imposed time frame for the X4 prototype. He decided he would see if he could use Femap™ software to do the structural analysis himself. The ease of use pleas-antly surprised him. “I opened a Solid Edge

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Solutions/ServicesSolid Edge www.siemens.com/solidedge

Customer’s primary businessRevetec Holdings, Ltd. is a world-class design engine company and developer of the Controlled Combustion Engine. www.revetec.com

Customer locationGold Coast, Queensland Australia

piston model and the software asked me where I wanted to put the loads,” he explains. “I entered the location (the top of piston) and the amount of the load. Then it asked where the design was constrained so I put in that, along with the material associated with the part. Then I clicked ‘Analyze.’ It was really that easy.” Now, what used to be a two-week process is done in half an hour.

Looking good is part of the benefitBeing able to do analysis in house has enabled Howell-Smith to save the $1,000 to $2,000/analysis the contractor was charging. More importantly, it lets him perform more analyses and use analysis results to optimize his designs. “On the X4, because analysis is integrated with Solid Edge and it can be done so quickly, I was able to analyze certain components that I wouldn’t have analyzed in the past,” says Howell-Smith. “And overall the design is better because of the ability to do this. In fact, I brought some old models back into Solid Edge and checked out some of the areas where we’d outsourced the analysis. Using Femap I was able to

remove about half the weight while mak-ing the parts stronger. I wish I’d had this capability earlier.”

Howell-Smith started designing the X4 on July 10, 2006 and finished modeling the entire engine before the end of the year. He figures the Solid Edge work took him about 1,000 hours, which includes all the analysis. The prototype is now built and is currently being set up on the dyno for initial tests and tuning.

There’s another aspect of Solid Edge that Howell-Smith has come to rely on in his efforts to sell his engine – the ability to produce highly realistic-looking images from CAD data. “We are a small operation but we like to have people see us as a larger operation than we are. I find the rendering capability in Solid Edge very useful for this,” Howell-Smith says. “With Solid Edge, I generate very attractive marketing materials. In fact, I have had the experience of showing some of these high resolution images to people and having them say, ‘I didn’t realize you’d built the engine already.’ They didn’t realize they were looking at a computer rendering.”

“ Because analysis is integrated with Solid Edge and it can be done so quickly, I was able to analyze certain components that I wouldn’t have analyzed in the past.”Bradley Howell-Smith Chairman Revetec Holdings, Ltd.