Configuration Tool Rods

A digital proposal engineer

Peter Heftberger, 11.05.2021

Rods are one of our main business fields and as already announced on the earth day 2021 in April, we want to inform you about current developments and projects regarding rods at RO-RA. We are focussing on the development, design, optimization and manufacturing of tie rods, because we believe that with our lightweight rods we can make a valuable contribution to a more sustainable flying. We are starting already with a resource-efficient design and manufacturing.

Therefore, we are developing a configuration tool to automatically calculate the best possible design in terms of weight, strength and manufacturing efficiency in the very early stage of a request for proposal (RFP). You can call it a digital proposal engineer. With that in mind we want to further improve our services for our customers and the cooperation with our customers. We are able to provide technical and commercial proposals for rods within a shorter period of time. Our value proposition is to work out the best possible solutions for high quality applications of our customers.

The configuration tool helps us to preserve resources of our valuable employees while increasing the quality of our proposals at the same time. Additionally, our employees have more time to work on and to develop smart and creative solutions for very specific rod applications of our customers.

The centrepiece of the configuration tool is an optimization algorithm that calculates the optimal configuration of rods in terms of customer requirements, such as geometry, function, load, environment and weight. The algorithm also takes into account a resource friendly use of materials and manufacturing strategy. The strength analysis is based on analytical formulas and the instability analysis is done by our in house developed numerical beam column analysis tool, which is based on Bernoulli’s beam theory. That enables us to develop best technical solutions for proposals at high precision and reliability automatically in a very short time.