Pentair uses FEA to help eliminate product-related complaints and rework
Pentair Valves and Controls business unit produces valves, actuators and flow control products. Pentair is a global leader in this domain and provides services and solutions for the most challenging applications across a variety of industries, including oil and gas, power, metallurgy and chemical.
Pentair’s Beijing Product Automation Center purchased seats of Femap and Solid Edge. Previously Pentair’s product designs were completely based on designer experience, an approach that would no longer sufficiently meet the enterprise’s design requirements, and the company needed to approach design data management and product performance analysis on a larger scale.
Implementing FEA earlier in the product R&D process – to analyze and verify the product and hence optimize the design – would be an effective way to change from passively answering customer questions to proactively having answers to any questions the customer is likely to raise.
For the FEA solution Femap was chosen for two primary reasons – for its seamless integration with Solid Edge, and for the fact that Femap is easy to learn and use allowing the company’s engineers to simulate and analyze their own projects.
Femap enables engineers to analyze the various running states of a product after installation, and allows designers to intuitively comprehend the relation of stress between controls and valves. This gives a clear view of the overall product’s structural integrity as well as the stress condition of every component.
You can read the full case study to find out more about how Pentair uses Femap to verify and optimize product designs.