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“Necessity, the mother of
invention” were the famous words of playwright George Farquhar, but the concept
can easily be applied to all of the 2012 Autodesk Inventor of the Month recipients. Each of these noteworthy inventors rose to a challenge to develop the most innovative design and engineering advancements,
with standout products that met a practical need.
And now a New Year is upon us, and that means it’s time to select the
2012 Inventor of the Year!
Autodesk annually encourages members of its Manufacturing community to choose and
honor one of the 2012 Autodesk Inventor
of the Month winners as Inventor of the Year. Voting
has kicked off here for this year’s Inventor of the Year competition.
The Autodesk
Inventor of the Month program identifies the most innovative among hundreds of
thousands of designers and engineers that invent with Autodesk Digital Prototyping
tools. This year’s recipients employed software including Autodesk Inventor
software as part of Autodesk Product Design Suite, Autodesk Factory Design Suite, the Autodesk Simulation family of products
and Autodesk PLM 360.
Community members
will select the next Inventor of the Year by voting for the best of the monthly
award winners from 2012, and the company with the highest rating will receive the
Inventor of the Year honor. Voting is under way and closes March 1 at 5 p.m. Pacific
time.
The Contenders: 2012 Inventor of the Month
Winners
January 2012: Tolar Manufacturing, a manufacturer of transit shelters, street
furniture and advertising kiosks, used Autodesk Product Design Suite to create
custom products tailored to the needs of municipalities throughout North
America. Tolar offers more than 500 shelter types within the company’s
four main product lines, each designed and engineered to be long-lasting,
attractive and environmentally friendly.
February
2012: 4th
Dimensional Façade Solutions, a New
Zealand-based design and build company, employed Autodesk Inventor software
to create stunning facades for projects with unique physical and environmental challenges,
as well as highly complex design and build procedures. The company’s work includes a café that sits on the edge of a 6,000 feet
high mountain and a stunning vacation home called Jagged Edge, where each
facade on the structure is rhombus-shaped and contains no 90-degree angles.
March
2012: Sunkist Research and Technical Services, a division of international fruit supplier
Sunkist, worked with Autodesk
Product Design Suite to develop a flat fruit-packing machine that
doubles hourly throughput. Typical flat fruit packing machines pack a single
layer of fruit into a box during each cycle, while Sunkist’s packing machine
can feed a layer of fruit into two
boxes at once. Instead of processing 200 boxes of fruit per hour, the machine
can potentially process 400 boxes per hour.
April 2012: HydroSpin, an Israel- based clean technology company, used Autodesk Inventor
software and other Autodesk Digital Prototyping tools to develop a micro-generator
solution that produces energy from the flow of water inside distribution pipes,
saving hundreds of hours of development time and hundreds of thousands of
development dollars. The generators power a wide range of “smart water” devices
that monitor the movement and quality of water, along with other
parameters, throughout the distribution network.
May
2012: Feige Filling, a German company, leveraged Autodesk
Factory Design Suite software to not only design its innovative filling
machines, but also the layout of its factories that house them. Feige used Autodesk Inventor together with the
complete Factory Design Suite to create equipment for its customers and then
optimize the factory layout before any equipment is installed. As a result,
Feige now serves as a “turnkey” solution provider to its customers, giving the
company a powerful advantage in the marketplace.
June 2012: Huntair, a leading designer and manufacturer of specialized heating,
ventilating and air conditioning systems, applied Autodesk Simulation CFD
and Autodesk Inventor software to develop the revolutionary CLEANSUITE airflow
delivery system. With healthcare-acquired infections claiming 99,000 U.S. lives
annually and costing the healthcare system billions of dollars, the CLEANSUITE
system helps avoid contamination of operating room patients.
July
2012: California Analytical Instruments developed gas analyzers and custom
systems using Autodesk Inventor software
as part of Autodesk Product Design Suite to help companies monitor and measure
the emission of greenhouse gases from a wide variety of pollutant sources, including
smokestacks, power plants, refineries and machines powered by internal
combustion engines. CAI has more than 1,700 customers.
August 2012: Ellis
Furniture, a U.K.-based furniture
company in business for more than a century, used Autodesk Product Design
Suite to offer greater levels of product customization in significantly
less time. For example, Ellis’ manufacturing process takes 80 percent less
time. This speed enables Ellis to rapidly explore a number of design options
for its customers — ranging from luxury hotels to government institutions — and
create high-quality furniture that not only fits their precise needs, but is
designed to last a lifetime.
September 2012: BMC, a Turkish automotive industry leader, utilizes Autodesk Product
Design Suite to improve design and production processes at its main plant in
Izmir, Turkey. Increased productivity allowed the company to more efficiently
produce a wide range of vehicles — from
light and heavy trucks, to buses and military vehicles — which are supplied to international and local markets, helping
BMC move toward becoming a global brand.
October
2012: MariCorp, a nationwide leader in the boat dock industry, was recognized for
using Autodesk PLM 360 to streamline project management and Autodesk Product
Design Suite to improve their designs. As a result of implementing Autodesk
software, the fast-growing company has been able to respond to bids more
quickly, execute designs more effectively and efficiently scale its
organization — helping reduce work tenfold.
November
2012: Autodesk chose the industrial
design students enrolled in the Automotive Design course at Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico City for using Autodesk Product
Design Suite with other Autodesk software tools to develop the Aurora concept
car. Rather than relying on a fuel-hungry central combustion engine, the Aurora
project uses hybrid propelling technologies to power the car.
December
2012: UVP,
a global leader in life science
imaging, designed and manufactured with Autodesk Product Design Suite scientific imaging equipment that is
used to identify potential cures for major diseases. UVP’s bioimaging systems
allow medical researchers to better understand the genetics of a variety of
diseases including cancer, diabetes and other major ailments.
