REFUdrive Increases Design Reuse by 30 Percent with SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Works

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REFUdrive India Pvt. Ltd. is the Pune-based design, engineering, and manufacturing team of REFUdrive GmbH, its system partner headquartered in Germany. The company specializes in designing and manufacturing electrical components and systems that power commercial vehicles and mobile machines, focusing on mechatronic, electric, and electrohydraulic technologies.

The REFUdrive design team utilized the SOLIDWORKS® portfolio of solutions until mid-2021 when management added 3DEXPERIENCE® Works. Fully compatible with SOLIDWORKS, the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform improves collaboration between team members in India and Germany while reducing time to market.

Manager of Mechanical Design, Vivek Singh, notes, “Our process requires receiving support and feedback from our German colleagues, which helps our development process . We needed to be able to share models and drawings via a web browser—rather than viewing them on an FTP site as we did in the past—to reduce the time spent on design reviews and make these reviews easier while maintaining the full design history and revision controls.”

More Efficient Development

Using 3DEXPERIENCE Works tools, the REFUdrive design team developed a dual inverter that drives electric induction and synchronous motor types without needing a speed sensor. The team experienced enhanced collaboration, increased project visibility among all team members, and greater design reuse, which reduced its design cycle by 15 percent.

Singh notes that the 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides better visibility into processes and projects with traceability of changes and decisions, offering a single integrated view to manage projects and processes in real time. “The 3DEXPERIENCE platform plays a crucial role in the product development process for creating detailed and innovative designs,” Singh explains. “The solution allows team members to apply their expertise in developing 3D models and assemblies that meet specific requirements and standards, thereby ensuring they are optimized for manufacturability and functionality.”

3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions in concert with SOLIDWORKS Simulation tools enable the REFUdrive design team to experiment with innovative concepts faster and validate final designs quicker and more cost effectively. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform uses virtual twins for realistic testing, simulating real-world functions without needing physical prototypes, saving time and resources. SOLIDWORKS Simulation tools help predict product failure with precise correlation to actual test results, saving tens of thousands of dollars in testing costs.

 Increasing Design Reuse

Since adding 3DEXPERIENCE Works solutions, REFUdrive has lowered its hardware and prototyping costs while increasing efficiency and productivity. In addition, Singh notes, “SOLIDWORKS solutions, when connected to the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE platform, have been reported to increase design reuse by 30 percent. This is achieved through powerful revision control tools within the 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio of product data management solutions.”

Singh concludes, “The increase in design reuse has also led to a reduction in development costs by 7 percent because reusing design elements can save resources that would otherwise be spent creating new designs. We are accelerating time to market by leveraging Cloud Services for SOLIDWORKS, which streamline 3D sharing, markup, data storage, design reviews, and collaboration, all of which effectively remove the everyday friction caused by file management tasks.”

If you’d like to streamline your product development with SOLIDWORKS and 3DEXPERIENCE Works, contact your local reseller.

SOLIDWORKS

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Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks Corp. offers complete 3D software tools that let you create, simulate, publish, and manage your data. SolidWorks products are easy to learn and use, and work together to help you design products better, faster, and more cost-effectively. The SolidWorks focus on ease-of-use allows more engineers, designers and other technology professionals than ever before to take advantage of 3D in bringing their designs to life.
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