Automation Startup Tackles Complex Engineering With Simulation

See how Perellion uses simulation to build custom machines and solve industrial equipment challenges with manufacturing and logistics solutions.

The tools were also used to design custom machinery with safety-critical components for a logistics application for a Fortune 500 company. To tackle this design, Ozen Engineering supported Perellion with refined fatigue analysis using Ansys tools, including model setup with boundary conditions. The part is now in production and deployed on a couple of hundred machines, with plans to scale into the thousands.

“There are some components on this machine so safety critical that if they fail, it could mean loss of life or limb for humans working on or around the machine, and these machines are subject to millions and millions of cycles in their design life,” Brown says.

Perfecting Process Development With Multiphysics

In another example of Perellion’s versatility, the team built a custom machine for an energy company to manufacture 1.5-meter-diameter quartz cylinders that melt quartz sand into glass.

The machine is a massive plasma arc furnace equipped with robots and cooling systems. Cooling components are certainly needed, considering the robotic system uses positioning axes to join three carbon electrodes and strike an arc of 10,000 amps (A) at 480 volts (V). For reference, arc flashes can exceed 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit, almost four times hotter than the Sun’s surface.

With nearly 5 megawatts (MW) of convective and radiant energy emanating from the furnace, Brown’s team used Mechanical software’s steady-state thermal module to analyze the thermal load’s impact. In addition, the team designed the systems to withstand the large heat flux loads for extended periods, as the cylinder doesn’t simply cool to ambient temperature. It’s a controlled process over several days.

“I’m very proud of what we produced because most automation builders would run away from this screaming, like, ‘Absolutely not, who wants to work on a project where you’re handling the Sun?’” Brown says. “Yet for us, that’s exactly the sort of problems we want to be working on — very hard, high-engineering content, deep analysis, and ultimately pushing the bounds of materials and physics.”

He emphasizes the importance of process development, explaining that once a machine is complete, it still takes time — sometimes up to a year — to get it working optimally in production.

“That’s the second half which, I think, interests way less folks in the space we operate,” he says. “And yet that’s where we provide a lot of value in that we want to work on it until it’s done, it’s working, and it’s in production.”

Brown’s team also developed the machine’s software interface and control system.

Starting Up Success With Emerging Technologies

Digital engineering with Ansys simulation software is not an option for Perellion engineers — it’s a necessity.

In addition to Mechanical software and LS-DYNA software, the team used Ansys Discovery 3D product simulation software and Ansys high-performance computing (HPC) solutions.

“It’s a necessary tool set for us to complete our job,” says Howard. “As much as we’d love to do everything on hand calcs and actually work through (problems) to make sure everything’s fine, you can’t use hand calcs for everything, so we needed to have Ansys software in the team.”

Brown says simulation has been most valuable for optimization, as demonstrated during the remotely adjustable CG lifting device design.

“We were absolutely running up against system mass limits, so we used Ansys simulation extensively to pull mass out of the system while maintaining very high factors of safety,” he says.

Brown also credits the Ansys Startup Program for helping Perellion flourish in its formative years.

“We’re a privately funded, bootstrapped engineering firm,” Brown says. “We didn’t start with $10 million from venture capital (VC) money or anything, and over the last 4-and-a-half years, we have made enormous investments in our enterprise resource planning (ERP), product life cycle management (PLM), computer-aided design (CAD) software, and all the software we use to write the control systems for our machines. The Ansys Startup Program has helped our business grow substantially. Money in the early days is tough to come by.”

What’s next for the startup?

“At the end of the day, we design and build machines and tools, but we want those machines and tools to be working on problems for tomorrow,” he says.

Ansys is dedicated to advancing industrial processes and equipment with innovative solutions. To learn how Ansys can support your early-to-mid-stage business, visit the Ansys Startup Program.