Domel developed out of the several hundred years old fashioned iron foundry tradition. Iron foundries and metal works faded away, however its tradition did not. Domel was established in 1946 by 16 founders as a metalworker’s manufacturing cooperative. Since then manufacturing has immensely expanded all through today. Today Domel is a flexible, innovative, high quality and globally orientated manufacturer of electric motors, laboratory equipment, components and tools. It employs more than 1100 people and has a multidisciplinary R&D department.
Numerical simulation tools have been used in Domel for more than 10 years. At first the numerical simulations were outsourced, but it was soon realised that such a tool is unavoidable when developing competitive products. To maintain competiveness every new product has to be better with regard to performance and costs. The lather usually leads also to less material build into the product as shown in 50 years of development of vacuum cleaner motors.
Currently we are doing numerical simulation of electromagnetic fields, mechanical stresses, natural frequencies, heat transfer and of injection moulding. In 2006 Domel started to perform aero-dynamical simulations and this was also the year the cooperation with SimTec started. Since then SimTec experts provided support at solving technical issues as well as organize training seminars for our engineers.
Today products are thoroughly numerically tested before first mechanical prototypes are made. This enables more reliable feasibility studies in predevelopment phase.
When developing electrical motors numerical simulations are made to improve their electromagnetic and mechanical properties. Use of electromagnetic simulations together with genetic algorithms makes possible to investigate a large pool of solutions, before doing the real prototypes (Image 1). With the use of ANSYS Fluent the motor structure is designed to have low aero-dynamic losses and to provide sufficient cooling of the electrical motor (Image 2). Simulation of mechanical stresses and natural frequencies of components further enables better mechanical design (Image 3).
Simulations are made also after the testing of the first prototypes. At this stage accurate experimental data are available and detailed optimisation is performed.
For laboratory centrifuges is important to have minimal heat rise to provide quality environment for testing samples. However heat influences also on performance and life time of our products as well. Products such as air-conditioning systems must operate for many years in environments such as Arctic cold or desert heat.
