Case Study: Oriental Motor boosts fan design and thermal analysis with Hexagon's Cradle CFD

Performing analysis including fans and utilizing results in many areas

Oriental Motor Co., Ltd., a developer of precision motors, faced significant challenges in designing high-performance cooling fans. The process was heavily reliant on physical prototypes and trial-and-error, which was time-consuming and costly. This was particularly problematic for specialized, high-demand products like the fans for the "Earth Simulator" supercomputer, where they had to create over 60 prototypes. They needed a way to visualize complex internal airflows to improve design efficiency and reduce development time, leading them to seek a solution from Hexagon.

Hexagon provided its SC/Tetra computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, which featured automatic unstructured meshing. This solution allowed Oriental Motor to perform thermo-fluid analyses quickly, reducing meshing time from weeks to about an hour. The software enabled engineers to visualize airflow and predict performance, drastically cutting down on the number of required physical prototypes. This efficiency gain freed up valuable engineering time to focus on innovation and helped the company avoid costly design errors early in the development process.

Oriental Motor

Takahiro Ito

Chief Researcher