学生アカウントを作成ザ・チャレンジ
Delta Development は、複数のロールを担うエンジニアを抱える小規模な軍事関連企業 R & D 企業として、チームの製品設計時間の 20% を管理に費やしていたITオーバーヘッドの削減を目指していました。Delta Developmentは、オンプレミスのCADシステムからクラウドネイティブなSaaS（Software-as-a-Service）製品設計プラットフォームに切り替え、ソフトウェアのインストール、ライセンス、定期的なシステムアップグレードに必要なダウンタイムを排除しました。
結果
- IT オーバーヘッドの削減により、設計時間を 20% 削減できました。
- 複数のエンジニアが同じ3D CADモデルで同時に作業できるため、一度に1人ずつ設計ファイルを処理する必要がありません。
- Onshapeは、リモートでの製品開発作業とより頻繁な設計レビューを可能にします。
ブラウザで共同作業ができるということは、私たちのような分散型チームにとって CAD の有用性が格段に高まります。私はこれまで 30 年間昔ながらのやり方でやってきましたが、アプローチを変えることに決めたことをとても嬉しく思います。」
多くの場合、軍事業界や医療業界は新しいテクノロジーやデバイスの恩恵を最初に受けるため、ローテクソリューションが標準となっている状況を知ると驚くばかりです。
いまだに昔ながらのソリューションに依存しているシナリオの1つは、血液、ワクチン、ウイルスサンプル、温度管理された医薬品の安全な輸送です。これらすべてには、信頼性の高い冷却システムが必要です。
Some hospitals, for example, are still using beverage coolers filled with ice to transport organ transplants. The military has used coolers with ice to transport emergency blood supplies and also has experimented with small mobile refrigerators originally meant to store beer or soda.
“Everybody has their own workaround right now, but there is no reliable solution currently following all of the FDA’s best practices,” says Robert Futch, CTO of Delta Development. “These refrigeration units are not designed with medical device guidelines for transporting blood safely. When you’re in the middle of the desert in Afghanistan, you can’t predict how long ice or a cooling device will really last, or how much power it has left. But you definitely know it’s not going to stay cold forever.”
Delta Development is a Tucson-based R&D company specializing in military applications for cooling and heating systems in extreme environments. The product development company was contracted by the U.S. Air Force to design and manufacture the Autonomous Portable Refrigeration Unit (APRU) for deployment by medics on the battlefield.
Current military procedures require wounded troops needing blood to be evacuated by helicopter to the nearest base or field hospital. The APRU enables medics to replenish blood to patients faster on the ground.
Delta Development has been collaborating with the 48th Rescue Squadron at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona for the design and testing of the device. The famed unit conducts combat search and rescue missions, serving as “guardian angels” during U.S. operations around the world. It also performs civil search and rescue, disaster relief, humanitarian aid, emergency medical evacuations, and counter-drug operations.
ポータブル医療用冷蔵庫は現在、極寒環境で活動してきた米国特殊作戦コマンド（SOCOM）、米国空軍特殊作戦コマンド（AFSOC）、米国陸軍レンジャー隊、カナダ特殊作戦部隊（CANSOF）などの軍事医療チームに配備されています。
Designing One of the “Smallest Refrigeration Systems in the World”
One of the Delta team’s biggest design challenges was centered around miniaturization: How do you shrink the typical 150-pound small hospital fridge to a more portable unit one-third to one-fourth its size and one-fifth its weight?
At a glance, the APRU (which holds six liters of blood) looks more like a large first aid kit or fishing tackle box than a refrigerator.
“What we should compare it to is what the medics are carrying right now,” says mechanical engineer Tim Gust. “They'll try to bring along these hospital refrigerators that are not really mobile devices. They have heavy batteries that come with them so they can be moved down the hall, but they weren’t meant to go out in a C-130 Hercules aircraft. They're not designed to be out in a tent in the desert – and certainly, they're not single-person carriable.”
“So we’ve developed one of the smallest refrigeration systems in the world,” he adds.
The compact 29-pound unit is 19” wide x 10” high x 10” deep. Its rechargeable battery lasts for 80 hours with a digital screen indicating remaining power. The dustproof and waterproof device is also operational in any orientation (on its side, upside down, tilted), runs in extreme hot and cold environments, and is designed to withstand the rigors of rescue operations.
APRUには内容物が凍らないようにヒーターが組み込まれています。このデバイスは、屋外機器に必要な全米電気製造業者協会（NEMA）の4X認証の一環として、アイシングテストに合格しました。外側に氷ができていても、ユニットは動作し続けます。
“One of the challenges was to make a rugged product that can withstand these high ambient conditions,” notes Gust. “And so part of making it rugged involved replacing the traditional condenser – that has a fan blowing air over the condenser – with just a large aluminum heat sink. That is pretty novel. Making that actually work took a lot of testing and FEA to really design the heat sink to reject that much heat.”
Having no fan means there are fewer moving parts to potentially break down.
“The passive heat exchangers are diecast aluminum structures that are very substantial and stiff and use convective natural cooling instead of active. So it’s completely different than your dorm fridge that would have a little fan blowing over some delicate aluminum fins,” he adds.
Onshape Helps Delta Accelerate Product Development
Delta Development 社は、自律型ポータブル冷凍ユニットの設計にあたり、PTC の SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) 製品開発プラットフォームである Onshape を選択しました。このプラットフォームは、堅牢な CAD ツールとリアルタイムコラボレーションおよびデータ管理を組み合わせたものです。
As a small company with 13 employees, Delta places a high value on versatility. Most of the team’s five mechanical engineers are also proficient at either electrical or software engineering as well.
“Before we started using Onshape, we were also our own IT guys,” explains Delta Development chief engineer Bill Barg. “We were constantly running out of disk space or having one computer fail and dealing with issues about local installations of software and trying to keep up with the license file on some server. About 20 percent of our time was just dealing with administrative issues, you know?”
“Now it's such a liberation to not ever have to worry about what's on our server because it's all on Onshape's servers. Not having to worry about IT overhead has been a huge time-saver for us,” he adds.
Onshape’s real-time collaboration tools allow multiple engineers to work simultaneously on the same 3D CAD model in the cloud. Whenever one team member makes a design change, everyone else on the team instantly sees it. A comprehensive Edit History tracks who made what change and when, allowing teams to instantly revert back to any prior stage of the design.
私が誰かにOnshapeを説明するときはいつも、「CADのGoogleドキュメントのようなものです」と言うと、彼らはすぐに「ああ、それはとても理にかなっています」と言ってくれます。なぜ彼ら（CAD業界）はまだそれをしていないのですか？」" はフッチって言うよ
“Being able to collaborate in a browser just makes CAD extremely more useful for a distributed team like ourselves. I previously spent 30 years doing it the old way and I’m very glad we decided to change our approach,” says Barg, who has used a number of file-based, on-premise CAD systems in his career.
Although its core design team is based in Arizona, Delta Development has an electrical engineer based in Montana and frequently partners with an injection molding company in Detroit.
“The ability to do mechanical design reviews remotely has been critical for us,” adds Futch. “When the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to work at home, we were able to continue as normal with our design process.”
Improving Life-Saving Equipment for Civilians
Delta’s engineering team is also currently developing a blood-warming device as a companion product to their blood-cooling unit. The new portable device would warm blood to body temperature in the field, reducing the risk of the patient getting hypothermia.
「パラレスキュー飛行隊と共同でこれらの製品を開発する中で、私が最も期待していることの1つは民間アプリケーションです」とフッチ氏は述べ、彼のチームはアリゾナ州とアラスカ州の消防署やライフフライトチームといくつかのパイロットプログラムも実施していると付け加えました。
Bargは、なぜポータブル血液貯蔵冷蔵庫がこれまで発明されなかったのかとよく聞かれると述べています。特に、その技術自体がすぐに利用できるためです。
“The answer is that it took a special team of players here – engineers, retired soldiers and retired medics – to first put the importance on it,” he says. “This refrigerator is now ready to save lives in the battlefield. And it’s because of our partners who are retired soldiers who bring us new points of view.”
「また、非常に困難なタスクをリーズナブルな価格で迅速に実行できる、エンジニアリング能力の新時代の始まりでもあります。このような製品設計を実現する新しい方法はたくさんあります。私が話しているのは、3Dモデリング、3Dプリント、さまざまな場所で働く人々の間のより迅速なコミュニケーション、そして重要なロールを果たしているさまざまな貢献者のギグエンジニアエコノミーです」とBarg氏は付け加えます。「これらの新しいエンジニアリングアプローチを活用し、良い目的に使用できることは非常に満足のいくものです。」