Predrag Radovanovic, CEO of Solfins – We Live in the Age of Engineering Abundance

Today we live in THE AGE OF ENGINEERING ABUNDANCE! Present engineering knowledge, hardware and software tools enable engineers to solve their tasks with ease and high confidence freeing them to perform more creative tasks. I will demonstrate this using two examples.

In 1985 analysis of Harmonic Drive Gears was a daunting topic. I felt it firsthand doing Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of Harmonic Drives for my Senior Thesis. For the unfamiliar these gearboxes were patented 1959. as strain wave gearing. Using this method with three basic parts, remarkably high gear ratios can be achieved (over 100:1). By 1980s they became extremely popular in the robot and machine tool industry, because of their high gear ratio and compact and light design.

Doing FEA at that time was a tedious job. There was no automatic mash generator, all the nodes had to be input manually. All computing power of the mainframe computer PDP 11/24 that we used in our department would be used by the FEA analysis, so I had to run FEA during the night when nobody else was working. I had to apply complex analytical calculations to determine the loads and the stresses in the ring gear.

Six months of challenging work finally paid off. The results of the analytical calculations matched FEA results as well as experimental data. My Senior Thesis received the Belgrade Chamber of the Economy Award for 1985.

Let us see what today can be performed in six days. Top photo shows a robotic arm that we redesigned for a customer using of Dassault/Solidworks simulation tools at Solfins d.o.o. We reduced the mass of the arm from 38 to 28 kg., but the arm was not weaker. The customer was able to increase the speed of the arm making them highly competitive on the market.

Author: Predrag Radovanovic, CEO of Solfins

Solfins d.o.o. Beograd

Privredna komora Beograda-PKB Beograd

Solfins

Chamber of Commerce of Belgrade

Predrag Radovanović

Harmonic Drive Gears

analysis of key elements

Finite Element Analysis

FEA analysis

gearboxes

robotic arm

Dassault simulation tools

SolidWorks simulation tools