SOLIDWORKS solutions in the Cloud enable Rocket Mavericks to accelerate their design schedule and better enable collaboration with their worldwide team.
Thomas Atchison infects you with his passion for space in just one conversation. Thomas is the founder of Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the notion that space should be accessible to all humans, not just the government and commercial aerospace companies. Mavericks Civilian Space Foundation (commonly referred to as The Rocket Mavericks) combines the resources of academia, amateur rocket enthusiasts, and professionals from the aerospace industry to bring space exploration to the masses.
Who Are the Rocket Mavericks?
The Rocket Mavericks are by no means a rocketry club. The Mavericks are a serious collaboration of engineers, scientists, students, and enthusiasts that includes oversight from the federal government. Practical and effective design and data collaboration are critical with that many pieces to the puzzle. Building rockets that can soar to the edge of our atmosphere requires a lot of knowledge. Thomas Atchison explained, "It isn't practical to have one team create the whole rocket design on their own. It is more practical to learn from the efforts of others and to collaborate when possible using the work and success accomplished by others. The desire is to create an open source style community for space exploration vehicles and technology so that we can leverage the experience of contributors while fostering the open exchange of design information. Design and engineering teams focus on certain elements of the rocket design. Creating the final product is truly a collaborative effort."
Historically, teams have seen failures due to an inability to focus on the multitude of engineering requirements appropriately. Designing rockets that reach the edge of space requires a huge amount of technical skill in various disciplines, from avionic to stabilization and propulsion. By distributing the design effort across many global teams and creating cross-functional collaboration, the Rocket Mavericks can focus on each engineering requirement.
Cloud CAD and PDM a Perfect Match For Company’s Distributed Design Teams
Mavericks include design teams from around the world. Nearly fifty individuals residing in dozens of locations around the globe make up the several design teams that comprise the Mavericks organization. Teams from universities in Cambridge and Oxford, England, must collaborate with teams from Stanford University in California. Engineers from Canada need to coordinate their design and analysis work with engineers in the United States. Organized teams oversee functional elements of the rocket such as Payload Management Systems, Propulsion, Stabilization and Trajectory Analysis, and of course, Mechanical Structure design.
Each of these design elements requires intensive and scalable computing power to complete the analysis and simulation essential for the design's success. Atchison describes the enormity of the necessary simulation and analysis when explaining that not only must a design team know the trajectory of the rocket, but it must also be able to predict to within 99.9% accuracy where every piece of a malfunctioning rocket would land within a predefined envelope.
Company Finds CAD and PDM Cloud Analysis Tool
Software tools such as SOLIDWORKS PDM and the array of analysis tools available in the SOLIDWORKS portfolio proved essential in accomplishing the design objectives. Still, the Mavericks team faced a serious technical challenge. With such a widely distributed team, how can they all take advantage of the available software tools' capabilities and still achieve the appropriate level of design collaboration and data exchange? Compounding this challenge is that each team member needs to have access to serious and scalable computational power to perform the types of simulations and analysis required.
Atchison carefully describes the skills and expertise possessed within the teams that make up Mavericks, but IT expertise is nowhere on the list. So how does a worldwide collaboration of engineers, scientists, designers, and rocket experts deal with the monumental computation and IT challenge presented by their project scope? Of course, they turn to the Cloud. Enter Chad Garrish and the team from EpiGrid.
The Results: Enhanced Collaboration and Accelerated Design
To empower the type of design collaboration required by the Mavericks team, EpiGrid integrated a Cloud infrastructure with their existing network and PDM vaults. Teams from all around the world had immediate access to data and unparalleled collaboration capabilities on demand. As icing on the cake, EpiGrid provided all required IT infrastructure and CAD administration support services, allowing design teams to focus on design rather than IT administration.
As a result of the powerful environment provided by EpiGrid, Mavericks was able to accelerate their design cycles using flexible computing resources, collaborate on designs, and share data on a global scale. They reduced their design validation costs and the need for specialized hardware for simulation tasks. Combined with their ability to focus on design and not on IT obstacles, Rocket Mavericks was able to see an overall reduction in costs.
Atchison says, "Without EpiGrid, there was no way we were going to be able to stand up the processing platform required to handle the huge design, analysis, and simulation challenges we faced."
