Customer Brief: ECT

Profile
Founded in 1994 ECT Industries has developed steadily through organic growth and acquisition. Today ECT is renowned for its design, engineering, and manufacturing expertise in electronic and electromechanical equipment, night vision systems, and data monitoring systems.

Guaranteeing Avionic Rack Performance
When ECT Toulon secured a contract to develop and produce avionic racks for military and civilian applications, the company recognized the opportunity to enhance its product quality and profitability with CAD-driven simulation tools. The selection and implementation of CFD became mission critical when ECT leadership made a commitment to guarantee rack performance.

The Challenges
To guarantee thermal management performance and reliability, ECT engineers knew they needed to optimize the mechanical design for air flow and ultimately to master the rack’s cooling efficiency using real-world operating scenarios. They also recognized that a design process based on physical prototyping and lab testing would consume too much time and erode profitability.

ECT Industries was already equipped with PTC’s Pro/Engineer for digital 3D design. They decided to integrate PTC’s Pro/MECHANICA for structural analysis and begin the search for integrated CFD-based electronics cooling simulation capabilities.

The Solution
CFdesign was chosen for its broad simulation scope, precision, and parametric integration with PTC’s solutions. The ECT team realized the associativity of Pro/ENGINEER, CFdesign, and Pro/MECHANICA allows an important time savings during the simulation phases, because CFdesign is directly opened and managed through Pro/E’s interface, without need to redefine the volumetric and material parameters.

“We found that CFdesign for Pro/ENGINEER enables us to design more reliable products and to guarantee the racks’ performances in always harsher aeronautic and naval applications with very high operating temperatures”, explained Frédéric Soddu, Research consultancy manager for ECT Industries Toulon.

Both multi-tasking engineers and system experts at ECT are deriving great value from the software’s ergonomics. In fact, the simplicity of the interface and the modular architecture of CFdesign guide engineers step by step, offering a real user-friendliness.

The Results
ECT achieved its performance objectives for the new line of avionic racks and today other applications, such as on-board computers and power supplies are benefitting from CFdesign during the early design stages.