CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
22 April 2013
Implementation Investments
ARC’TERYX Engineers Airbag Rescue System with Help from Advanced Design Technology
Advanced Design Technology (ADT) today announced that its customer, ARC’TERYX Equipment Inc. (ARC’TERYX), the Vancouver-based outdoor clothing and sporting goods manufacturing company, hired ADT to assist in the design of an evolutionary avalanche airbag backpack system that will save lives while providing a far superior user experience via a battery-powered electric motor that inflates airbags instead of relying on compressed gas cartridges or cylinders. ADT optimized the blower system.
“I was initially drawn to ADT when looking for software to use in designing the blower,” said Gordon Rose, senior industrial designer for ARC’TERYX. “But, after contacting ADT and discussing the complexity of the project, we decided a much better solution was to use ADT’s design expertise and have them optimize the blower system.”
ARC’TERYX worked with London-based ADT to engineer the new avalanche airbag backpack using three-dimensional (3D) inverse design methodology, which now enables engineers to specify the desired flow field (via blade loading) along with the total work required and automatically generate the geometry that produces that flow field. By specifying the blade loading, engineers have direct control over the 3D pressure and velocity distributions, which allows for direct control of the 3D flow field and an intuitive connection between the design input and the resulting performance. This change allowed the engineers to explore a large part of the design space and arrive at the resulting breakthrough design.
Skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers and hikers familiar with existing avalanche airbag systems can attest that current products, while dramatically increasing one’s chances of surviving an avalanche, can be expensive, cumbersome and difficult to use and maintain due to many reasons such as the need to refill cylinders and cartridges after each use and/or carry extra cartridges on trips and the need to empty cylinders when flying in the United States (U.S.) per U.S Department of Transportation (DoT) regulations. These and other onerous drawbacks to existing systems have been eliminated from ARC’TERYX’s design. (Click here for a link to a blog post about the product patent).
“Our 3D inverse design optimization technology provides innovative solutions while reducing development time and costs,” said Professor Mehrdad Zangeneh, founder and managing director of ADT. “By using TURBOdesign1 on the ARC’TERYX avalanche airbag backpack air blower we could achieve their stringent requirements in terms of small size and high efficiency. Furthermore we could achieve a design which could meet contrasting requirements in terms of high pressure at initial deployment of the airbag and then high flow rate for rapidly filling up the bag.”
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