Posted to News on 12th Jun 2008, 00:00
Autodesk Inventor accelerates Antarctic research
Autodesk Inventor is helping the British Antarctic Survey team get products that right first time and into the field faster. Andy Tait is a mechanical design engineer at British Antarctic Survey (BAS), within technical services in the Antarctic and Marine Engineering Group, and is something of a fan of Autodesk Inventor - a dynamic 3D package enabling highly accurate and easy-to-visualise digital prototyping. In fact, it was only thanks to Inventor that Tait's team managed to turn around a very last-minute project to design a probe-based ground radar system, to be mounted on the front of a snowcat. Its purpose is to look for cracks on the snow surface and prevent the snowcat from plunging into a crevice. "This was an important project, but it came to us very late in the day," Tait explains. "Yet we were able to get it right first time thanks to Inventor, and deliver the device with incredible speed."
Summarising some of the key benefits of Inventor, Tait says: "The solid modelling side, for us, is the way forward. Inventor grows in its capabilities every year, with the addition of new features. But what we love about Inventor is that it is photo-realistic. Not only does this help us get our models right first time, it enables the scientists to feature the devices in their presentations. With the financial restraints we are operating under, we can only produce one finished product which then gets sent out to the Antarctic, but with Inventor, the scientists can demonstrate the product to help them explain their work when presenting their discoveries to the Science Institute at conferences and seminars."
