Autodesk Inc., a San Rafael, Calif.-based software engineering company, has named Ideas*, an Australian engineering services firm, its Inventor of the Month for January 2010. According to an Autodesk press release, the company used its software to design and develop what it calls “the world’s most advanced construction recycling facility.” The facility, based in Victoria, Australia, will be capable or recycling 1 million tons of demolition materials per year, the release says.
Ideas* designed and engineered the facility for the Alex Fraser Group. The facility, the size of four football fields, uses the technology to recycle construction and demolition materials, the Autodesk release says. Since products made from recycled concrete have 65 percent less carbon impact than products made from quarried stone, the recycling plant promises to significantly reduce the environmental impact of construction projects throughout Australia.
Design work on the project was subcontracted to 14 different fabricators. Autodesk says its Inventor software provided a flexible, central management point for the different teams, facilitating important design revisions across the entire project.
“A design project of this scale would have been impossible without Autodesk Inventor,” says Michael Percy, managing director of ideas*. “All team members used Inventor to create digital prototypes, enabling faster design decisions and improvements earlier in, and throughout, the design process. The result was a greatly improved system, with less costly rework and modifications during installation and commissioning.”
Key plant features designed with Autodesk Inventor software include a “dual jaw crusher” for breaking down construction materials into smaller chunks, a comprehensive multilayered separation system and a high-capacity “pug mill” for grinding and mixing materials to form high-quality road base materials, the company says. The collaborative approach taken by ideas* and its extended team enabled the entire project to be installed within 10 months of the first designs.
More information about Autodesk software is available at www.autodesk.com.