GRI – Gestamp Renewable Industries

Cliente: GRI Renewable Industries
Challenge: Reduce the time required to generate the model and manufacturing drawings for wind turbine towers.
Services:Product development consulting and custom application development.

Background

To set the context, let’s review the process GRI followed for each order. First, they received a request including a dossier with all required specifications (drawings, bill of materials, and purchasing requirements). From the moment specifications were received until manufacturing drawings were required, there was an approximate lead time of 4 weeks. The process consisted of generating a 3D model from a master template, driven by a design table in Excel. Through this table, thickness and diameter parameters were entered to generate the 3D model.

Afterwards, weldable components were placed one by one into the 3D model. As can be seen, this was a cumbersome process involving highly repetitive tasks for engineers, as components had to be manually inserted one by one into the design.

After a product development consulting process, we carried out an analysis and diagnosis and identified the following issues:

• Lead times were too short, making it impossible to complete the full 3D model, resulting in incomplete manufacturing documentation
• Manually placing weldable components one by one required so much effort that it was often not fully carried out
• Model information was not linked to the rest of the required technical documentation
• The current application was limited and prone to generating errors

Easyworks solutions

This was the action plan that was implemented.

1. Solution implementation and automation of wind turbine design

   Thanks to the implementation of DriveWorksXpress, 3D designs, parts, assemblies, and required drawings are now automatically generated from predefined templates. This is a solution that is easy to use and manage for engineering teams.

2. Automated insertion of weldable components
   A custom application was developed to automatically place pre-designed components into the model. By providing the component to be inserted along with its coordinates, the system positions each element automatically within the assembly. In addition, a tool was developed to export 3D model property data into an Excel file. This enables data validation against the inputs used during model creation, as well as the generation of accurate production and quality documentation.

   Successful results!

   • Significant reduction in the time required to generate 3D models and manufacturing drawings for wind turbine towers
   • Full model generation, including all internal weldable components
   • Reduction of errors during project preparation
   • Elimination of manual data entry in associated technical documentation

   Thank you to GRI for their trust in us  ♥