Customer Success Story: FARAD S.A.

Summary

FARAD SA has been designing and manufacturing high-quality tubular & gasketed Plate Heat Exchangers since 1979, serving domestic and international markets, using its long-standing experience, cutting-edge technology, and advanced manufacturing and storage facilities.

Cooling Coils for the Nuclear Industry

To manage the designing and manufacturing process smoothly and bring products to market as efficiently as possible, the company relies on the Autodesk Product Design & Manufacturing Collection, including Inventor, Nastran, Fusion 360, AutoCAD, and Vault for data management.

In the nuclear power industry, safety is paramount and performance is critical. FARAD manufactures Cooling Coils for environmental safety systems which require temperature control in addition to air filtration and gaseous contaminant removal. Typical applications include emergency and/or normal cooling of Reactor Containment, control rooms, switch gear, pump rooms, and process air.

FARAD’s nuclear coils are custom designed to meet the Customer’s specifications. The coils are built and tested to relevant code requirements for certified quality assurance, aspects of design, material traceability, manufacture, and testing. The coils can be fabricated from either copper or 90-10 copper-nickel tubing with type 316 stainless steel support frames.

To overcome the challenges mentioned above, the designing team needs to collaborate with the production line that uses in conjunction two powerful tools from the Product Design & Manufacturing Collection, Inventor Professional, and Fusion 360.

The designing team with the use of Inventor Professional creates detailed high-end parts within the required tolerances for the assemblies, needed for the decision-making. The production line then uses this information and creates successful CAM sequences for the final production of the Nuclear Cooling Coil. 

In particular, using Inventor Professional, which is found in the Collection, made it easier to create designs, see what the finished product will look like as well as generate key advantages in business development, such as the reduction of costs due to assembly issues, which do not happen or are reduced to minimum. 

Saving time by streamlining design and manufacture

Frequently, the product is needed on very short notice; sometimes, even for a large, multi-component structure. Designs are routinely changed at frequent intervals. Customer changes were challenging because the Engineering, Design, and Manufacturing teams were not seamlessly linked.

Farad’s approach to product design relies on a combination of Autodesk Inventor for 3D modeling and 2D documentation and Autodesk Vault to manage the data and be the basis of collaboration between design and fabrication. The process starts when the R&D team begins rough modeling in Inventor, whether the concept is a new heat exchanger or an expansion of an existing one. At this point, the team creates general arrangement drawings that show what the product will look like and how it will perform.

"Autodesk tools come into play, by making it easier for us to focus on actually making the engineering division capable of delivering high-quality solutions based on our customer’s problem," says Alexandros Kremmydas, Technical Manager at Farad.

Using multiple Autodesk products together had been the sensible solution, and all of Farad’s engineering and development work is managed via Vault.

"Vault is an excellent tool for product management, and it ensures that there are no overlapping designs. The people working in the production can always rely on Vault giving the right information on which drawing is the latest one" says Alexandros Kremmydas, Technical Manager at Farad.

Vault has also given a viable way to get rid of paper entirely throughout the design, engineering, and production workflow because the software makes it easy to control which teams are viewing which data.