Research overview: 

Seabee Cylinders and Chrome came to ISU and asked for assistance in looking at functional characteristics of a cylinder and determining how to optimize those operating parameters and finding methods to theoretically determine some of the outcomes, said Chris Hill, who works for Iowa State University’s Center for Industrial Research and Service.

The hydraulic cylinders are instrumental in providing the range of motion and lift needed in heavy equipment used in agriculture, mining, oil-drilling, construction and other industries.

Seabee believes it will be at a competitive advantage if it has more information about what happens to cylinders in operation. Computerized product design makes it easier for scientists to analyze what is happening. 

“You have ways to calculate the performance, and it can be an advantage to come up with a method to determine that margin of error and then confirm that,” Hill said. 

“There are standard calculations. Those for certain applications may not be the most accurate. If you can devise an updated theoretical model that better anticipates the performance, and you can quickly verify that performance in a lab setting, then you can say this is very accurate for these conditions.” 

The Method: 

Through computer analysis, the scientist will check the accuracy of various calculations and projections on the functional characteristics of cylinders and will look for ways to optimize the operating parameters.

Conclusion:

How can this project help other businesses? Perhaps most by serving as an example of how university research and technical assistance can help businesses with a wide range of needs.

“We can make better product, optimize it to a customer and do it quicker,” said Hill.

“Without getting into too many details, we are investigating how technical design decisions affect the operating performance of Seabee’s products,” Steward said. “More specifically, we are using computer models of a component’s dynamic response and then validating those models with experiments in our laboratories. What we learn from these investigations, we plan to turn into design tools that can be used by engineers to guide design decision making.”

Hill said CIRAS can offer analysis of a range of options. “Basically what we are able to do is provide small and medium-size companies access to ISU faculty and resources and allow them to conduct technical assistance and contract research projects that otherwise might be cost prohibitive.” 

CIRAS does a fair amount of work helping develop animal food, working both in labs and in animal feeding facilities. Parts of those studies have involved feeding what otherwise would have been waste material to livestock. 

“Typically, those projects have very large impacts,” Hill said. Farmers who were paying to get rid of wastes can instead use the material to make money, he added.

Companies often engage with CIRAS and with the Institute for Physical Research and Technology either for contract research or for technical assistance.
“We have experts in subject matter that companies may not have,” Hill said. “They may not have the resources or equipment to do precision evaluation and controlled experiments to understand if there is potential.”

With the help of university researchers, “they can work on a project that may have an economic benefit to the state of Iowa, and help a company.”

Steward, the scientist, said the work shows the advantages that lower-cost computing have brought to many types of businesses.

“For some time, we have been working with physical modeling techniques,” Steward said. “These techniques enable virtual prototyping to help engineers narrow the design space before committing to a physical prototype with associated time and financial costs. Advances in low-cost computing and dynamic simulation tools/software enable our ability to do much more virtual engineering today than in the past.”

Officials at Seabee could not be reached for comment.

The new techniques can bring new inquiries, Steward said.

“The use of modeling and simulation technology opens up new research questions, because we are expecting our engineering models to provide a greater degree of fidelity than in the past because engineers intend to do more precise engineering. Thus, we start asking interesting questions about the model validity — do they accurately represent the real world? Under what conditions do they represent the real world? Which design parameters affect component or system performance? How can we link experimental results with models and simulation?”

The work with cylinders in Iowa could help answer those questions.

Resources:
www.iprt.iastate.edu
www.ciras.iastate.edu