Hagerman & Company provides custom solutions for FEA Pioneer.

The Project

Mike Hatch is a mechanical engineer consulting in the disk-drive industry and was one of the first to use Finite Element techniques to improve the design of various elements in disk-drives. Because virtually every element in a disk drive can be meshed in 2D and then extruded, AutoCAD 2D drawings are the basis for his models. He has developed a suite of meshing/nodeing tools that enable manual meshing and nodeing and then extracting node numbers and coordinates in ANSYS input format.

The Challenge

The original AutoLisp code was written 30 years ago, was in need of updating and the original developers were no longer available. Hagerman & Company had been Mike’s AutoCAD distributor for years and he was interested in seeing whether they had the skill set to provide him with a new, updated set of tools. Mike also needed to be sure that support for debugging and future modifications would be available.

The Solution

Hagerman & Company Solutions Engineer Forrest Judd built a custom toolset to exactly match his needs, written primarily in C# to ensure long-term compatibility with future versions of AutoCAD. This included some custom commands for node numbering and export, along with a host of LISP routines to make AutoCAD function in the way to which he was accustomed.

The Results & Benefits

The code is critical to his work and the tools that Hagerman & Company provided him with function very well. “Forrest Judd was able to take my requirements and did a very professional job of creating a proposal, creating the code and supplying a very well-documented procedure for installing.”

Mike was also looking for support and the security that comes with having Hagerman & Company solutions engineers available for code enhancements or phone support when necessary. He has appreciated the “good service, great programming skills, and the knowledge that Hagerman & Company is around for future support”.

Michael Hatch, P.E.

With over 30 years of experience in the design and analysis of disk drives, Michael provides ANSYS finite element, MATLAB modeling and vibration problem solving consulting services. He has worked with over 35 companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Techniques and programs for developing small efficient MATLAB models from the results of large finite element models are documented in his book, Vibration Simylation Using MATLAB and ANSYS.