Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 9, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Wilo AG of Dortmund, a manufacturer of pumps and pump systems for heating, refrigeration and air-conditioning technology, water supply, and wastewater treatment and disposal, is using VR technology from 3Dims and VISENSO to develop its products.
Since developing the “Wilo-Stratos,” the world’s first high-efficiency pump for heating, air-conditioning and refrigeration applications, Wilo has been regarded as an innovation leader in building-services engineering. To strengthen its position and achieve a leading role in other business areas such as water supply and wastewater disposal, virtual prototypes are now being used alongside a wide range of state-of-the-art measurement and testing technologies to optimize the development process.
Research and development has traditionally been highly important to Wilo. The Advanced Research and Technology Centre (ARTEC) at its Dortmund headquarters, whose core areas are motor technology, fluid technology, materials technology and control technology, plays a particularly important role. The approximately 2,500-square-metre research laboratory has now been expanded further through a pioneering investment in an innovative VR environment. Virtual reality enables Wilo to improve its analysis of design data and calculation results, thereby supporting the development of pump systems with maximum performance and reliably outstanding quality.
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CAD design data from pump development can now be transformed within R&D into realistic, interactive simulations viewed from different perspectives, allowing flow processes and component loads to be visualized interactively and in three dimensions during the development process.
For the installation, Wilo relied on two VR experts with long-standing experience: Frankfurt-based 3Dims GmbH and Stuttgart-based VISENSO GmbH. While VISENSO, with its COVISE VR software, is among the leading providers of virtual-reality visualization for numerical calculation results, 3Dims has for many years been a proven partner in implementing immersive hardware environments.
With its numerous direct interfaces to a wide variety of design and simulation programs and its enormous capacity for handling large volumes of data—such as those generated particularly in pump engineering—COVISE proved to be the highest-performing application software in an international benchmark. In simulations of complex flows (CFD), for example, transient data can also be visualized, or CAD data can be linked to predefined interactive animations. Complex calculation results produced when the flow of water through a multistage pump is calculated on a 64-bit high-performance cluster can be clearly visualized and analyzed in the VR environment with COVISE in a very short time. The aim of the simulation is to transfer the motor’s power to the pumped medium, water, as efficiently as possible. By adding streamlines, the path of the water through the pump can be followed. COVISE also makes it possible to visualize structural-mechanics results, such as the pressure distribution on moving blades. Other aspects include examining velocity profiles in the channels and at the inlet and outlet, as well as stresses during assembly of the housing. At Wilo, Abaqus, CFX and ProE data are visualized together in COVISE. The new COVISE user interface, adaptable to the needs of specific application areas, enables the technology to be deployed quickly and easily—even by inexperienced VR beginners. In addition to research and development, Wilo also uses virtual reality for customer presentations, successfully demonstrating its technological expertise there as well.
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To create the immersive environment, a 3Dims Buenavista display system (image size 300 x 168 cm) with two high-performance projectors from Projectiondesign (F30 1080p), Infitec filter technology and an optical tracking system from ART was installed in Wilo’s research laboratory. The computing system is a Fujitsu Siemens FSC R650 (16 GB RAM) with an Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 graphics card.
Dr Frank-Hendrik Wurm, head of the Research and Technology Centre, explained: “This innovative VR technology, which is probably unique in our industry to date, provides an important additional means of evaluating pump development even before prototypes are produced. Among other things, this makes it possible to reduce development costs and time, so that our customers worldwide can gain access to the latest ‘pump intelligence’ from Wilo as quickly as possible.”
Further information is available on the website.
Further Links:
- Visenso
