ABB Powertech Transformers go Pro/ENGINEER route

ABB Powertech Transformers go Pro/ENGINEER route

ABB Powertech Transformers, manufacturers of medium and large power transformers of ratings up to 800MVA and voltages up to 800 000 volts, have decided to change their entire design facility to Pro/ENGINEER software. The company, jointly owned by the Power Technologies Group and Asea Brown Boveri, have internationally standardized on Pro/ENGINEER for their mechanical designs.

Together with Parametric Technologies Corporation(PTC), the developers of the Pro/Engineer suite of integrated product development and information management software, they have developed software packages over the past 10 years that have revolutionised the power transformer design.

Known as Common Product and lately re-named TRAFOSTAR, the packages will ensure, for example, a transformer manufactured in China to the same customer specification as one manufactured in South Africa would be interchangeable and would look exactly the same. Design times on large transformers have been reduced from over 2000 man hours to about 100/300 hours. Factory rework has been halved as have drawing alterations and a complete and comprehensive tender design can be completed in a day.

Gone are the days of manually calculating. By entering sizes, masses and design parameters into a program a model is created and, all detail drawings for tank body plates and bottom plates to stiffeners, cover, lifting beams, jacking points and down to the last nut, bolt and washer are generated. The designer and detail draughtsman become obsolete. The engineers create the model and the system produces the design and the detail drawings.Production planning also becomes obsolete as the system produces a fully detailed bill of materials, taking into account the stocked sizes of materials, when linked to a suitable MRP system.Issuing of drawings to the workshops also becomes obsolete as these stations can be linked and costing of the design will also be done automatically with specific factory labour and material costs taken into account.

ABB Powertech Technologies, with a factory in Pretoria West and producing not only for the local market but also for the USA, UK, Middle East and other African countries, have recently been as the centre for excellence by the Group, in preference to a number of other plants in Europe, The Americas and China. They have recently purchased a further eight seats of Pro/ENGINEER, bringing the total to 14, from local PTC representatives Automated Reasoning who will assist with the installation, configuration and training.For full details email:- areason@areason.co.za or tel:- 011- 655 8070 or visit the Web at www.areason.co.za or www.ptc.com .

News supplied by: B.A.Crawford Specialised Publications (PTY) LTD
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