Customer Brief: Bongard

Profile
Founded in 1922, Bongard is the French specialist of bakery and pastry equipment. The company and its 280 employees manage three production sites in Europe including one in France where the big ovens are manufactured. In addition to equipment, Bongard offers engineering services such as plan studies. Bongard’s quality management system received ISO 9001 v2000 certification in February 2007.

The Challenges
In 2001, Bongard wanted to completely revise its oven range with an emphasis on innovation in the following areas:
- Saving energy
- Ergonomics and security for bakeries
- Efficiency and profitability of bakers work time

To support the challenge a new team was recruited to conduct a study on the merit of CFD software. The objective was to reduce manual calculations and physical prototyping so engineers could devote more time on innovation. All three branches of Bongard’s Research department (New Products, Product Enhancement, and Value Analysis) needed to be satisfied with a single CFD solution that works well with Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/INTRALINK from PTC.

• New Products – department consists of 6 persons, who design about 7 new products per year
• Product Enhancement – department consists of 6 persons who are in charge of the analysis of customers comments (dysfunction, ergonomics’ problem etc…) Solutions found in this department are automatically integrated in new products.
• Value Analysis – department consists of 4 people tasked with finding the best quality/price ratio solution.

The Solution
Blue Ridge Numerics’ solution was chosen after a study of six months. Concretes cases were accomplished during the study such as the design of double circuit rotary baking oven. Simulation results were consistently reliable and CFdesign appeared the more effective software with many advantages such as:
- Ergonomics and easy to use even for non-engineers
- The perfect and reliable integration with Pro/Engineer
- The ability to easily extract dynamic images for anyone to understand, which became a real business tool for sales managers.

The Results
CFdesign is helping Bongard design more energy efficient ovens that deliver superior uniform baking.

One example how CFdesign is helping Bongard deliver superior ovens is by solving overheating problems. CFdesign ensures the recognition of poorly ventilated areas and allows optimization of air speed for even, uniform baking along with the optimization of the ventilation hood’s extraction on the entire area.

The combination of CFdesign with Pro/ENGINEER ensures the Bongard team can quickly analyze the temperature of the inside surfaces according to the oven’s form in order to avoid warping.

Energy efficiency is another area where CFdesign has made a significant contribution, driving improvements of up to 14% More longer term medium term, Bongard is considering the inclusion of an “energy gain” norm for its ovens, based on CFdesign results.

The CFdesign Design Communication Center, a unique shareware viewing tool for CFdesign simulations, is effectively being used by Bongard’s sales managers to improve communication with customers.