2004 PTC/USER Nashville Conference

Daily Email Day 2

Day 2 June 15
written by Kelly Bryant, Teknovation, Inc.

The second day of the conference is finally complete and the long days are starting to show on the faces of many people. One day to go.

Today's topics:


Discovering today’s PTC/USER trivia

The name of the user group was initially Pro/USER when it was formed in 1990. At one time, the PTC product line consisted only of Pro/ENGINEER, but as more products were developed or acquired, the group name wasn’t reflective of the broad variety of applications within the user community. A few years ago the name was changed from Pro/USER to PTC/USER to reflect the breadth of the PTC product lines.


Keynote Address Rapidly Innovating Design and Engineering at Pole Speed

David Holden from Richard Childress Racing (RCR) presented a great overview of how his company uses PTC products. RCR has 12 users and has used PTC products for seven years.

Holden presented a short introduction into the history of NASCAR and its beginnings from moonshine runners who had fast cars and needed a new outlet in which to drive those cars. He said that NASCAR is technology driven as the RCR team tries to remain successful in a highly competitive playing field. He said that the need for new or improved parts comes from NASCAR rule changes & technical partners’ capabilities.

Holden said it takes seven days to build a body from scratch, and a total of 3 to 4 weeks for a complete new car. RCR uses PTC products for modeling, FEA, machining, kinematics and design optimization. They design and machine 95 to 97 percent of all the parts on the cars using Wildfire and a couple of Wildfire 2.0 licenses.

A few of the places RCR uses PTC products are:

  • Piston design : analysis results are usually within 5 percent of the actual test results. They also use Vericut for manufacturing simulation.
  • Valve train design : engineers are working toward 10,000 RPM on the engines. Currently, the limiting factors are the rocker arms and valve spring retainers. RCR has reduced the mass & moment of inertia by using Pro/ENGINEER.
  • Chassis model : RCR has developed a kinematics model using family tables with hundreds of variations. This model is excellent when compared to the real car.

David says the future for RCR is in the areas of advanced kinematics simulation, computational fluid dynamics, and body surfacing using scanned data. He also stated that they will be starting a Windchill implementation soon to manage all their data.

Using Pro/ENGINEER allows RCR engineers to design cars in a highly competitive environment and with an increasingly shorter product life cycle.


Product Update Briefing -- Windchill ProjectLink

One of the applications I wanted to learn more about this week was ProjectLink. As industry continues to globally outsource more of the engineering functions, there is a great need to share data securely and seamlessly.

Some typical applications for ProjectLink are global collaboration, managing new product introductions and managing Six Sigma initiatives. ProjectLink is a global web-based project portal and is organized by projects, for individuals and provides easy access for new users.

Many companies use ProjectLink for new product development process, because it has templates to use for setting up your project, has stage-gate capabilities, and has workflows that are configurable for your needs.

Some of the items about ProjectLink that are appealing are that you don’t have to involve the I.T. department to create new projects; it has a web browser interface; and has peer-to-peer conferencing built in. It also has audit access to the projects and objects within those projects to find out who has accessed them or changed the information.

The update for tomorrow's information won't be sent out until Thursday ....

Regards,
Kelly Bryant
Teknovation, Inc.