Structural Engineering for Design, Modification and Certification projects
Engineering is at the core of our business and the basis by which we have delivered so many solutions to customers. We have invested in the people and tools to make sure we have a wide and comprehensive engineering team that combines experience, knowledge and drive to make us the perfect partner to meet the structural engineering challenges of those customers.
At Cascade Engineering we offer a full spectrum of services, from specific analyses through to full certification of complete designs, so customers can pick one or two of the key services as required, or can be supported through the entire process and increase the success rate of bringing profitable engineered solutions to market.
For expert support on your critical structural engineering challenges, please call us on +44 1252 594121 or email info@cascade-engineering.co.uk.
In a world with hundreds of structural analysis tools available, integrated into numerous software packages to aid the design of all manner of structural products, computer analysis has historically been used to speed up the problem finding process and thus, more importantly, attempt to reduce time and cost, whilst improving quality and performance. Naturally, we have access to the most cutting edge structural analysis tools in a wide range of software packages, but it is our skill to be able to pick the right tool and then leverage our experience and knowledge that sets us apart in the market. We are passionate about finding root causes and reporting back improvements, making our analysis a high value, quality service and considerably more than just running software.
With 100’s of successful projects behind us and 200+years of experience, structural design is what we do best. We take the environmental and performance requirements of the structure and put this through our proven internal design process to make sure we are creating critical structural designs that can handle load, torque and impact in a way that maintains structural integrity and balances this against weight, performance and cost. We leverage off the extremely diverse projects we have previously delivered to combine the best solutions for any new challenges that our customers set us. We use the latest software to create our designs, but it is by using the best people with the most relevant experience that means we are able to deliver projects on time, in full, giving us the 100% project completion rate we are proud to maintain. We understand, design and then deliver, in whatever format works best for your business, providing dependable solutions that last for decades.
There are over 39,000 military and commercial aircraft active in the world. Combine this with the 50,000 ships and 62,500 power plants and it becomes clear that the market for modification is often bigger than the market for new build projects. Therefore, many of our customers know us for our modification service on legacy aircraft, defence, marine and power programmes. When you have a new design or a design that is in current production you have a wide range of design freedoms, but when dealing with legacy vehicles, the lack of design freedom means you need high skills and more knowledge to achieve true improvements, especially if there is no support from the OEM.
At Cascade Engineering we know how to take the modification brief and deliver back a solution that can be implemented in a cost and time efficient way, as well as being fully certified. We are able to modify an existing structure to account for additional load, add additional capability or space, whilst ensuring the original design concept is kept intact. Modifications are regarded by many as hard, but we are proven to be capable, some may say experts.
Enhancements have a lots of similarities to modifications, but differ in one major way: they are not normally driven from the original equipment manufacturer, but from the end user who wants to add in more capability or performance to the vehicle they already own. A good example would be the MOD or an airline that has a drive to make structural changes to a fleet of vehicles, to meet either an operational or business need. This might be the introduction of a radar into a commercially available commuter aircraft or reducing the weight or expanding the payload area to deliver a commercial advantage in the market. Customers can either come to us with the enhancements they specifically require, or we can conduct analysis to find the areas of a structure which can be enhanced to increase performance or reduce weight and fulfil your business needs.
Through the design process a lot can change as the design team overcome micro and macro changes in scope, performance and, as each element of a vehicle competes for space within the main structure, the load that that structure can take. Due to this and other factors, the final structure is not normally fully optimised to meet the sweet spot for design, cost, performance and / or manufacturability. This is where our expert structural optimisation service allows customers to have their structure reviewed and given specialist engineering treatment to maximise the performance of the structure. This could be weight reduction or small design changes to allow the structure to perform at its best. Complete structural optimisation is the goal of all designs and by using our FEA optimisation tools, from the likes of Altair and MSC, we allow clients to either confirm it has been achieved or provide the expertise to advise key improvements to help achieve it.
The ultimate goal of all critical structures is for them to be certified by an authorising body such as the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), maybe the customer itself in the defence sector or Lloyds Register for marine projects. It is this end goal that drives all the design decisions to ensure the most efficiently engineered structure possible, while at the same time working within the programme’s time and budget constraints.
At Cascade Engineering we offer both the pathway to certification internally, with our own design team, or as a third party to oversee and manage your own design team. In essence, we are qualified and capable of providing an approved signatory to support and manage certification or provide a service to deliver certification for your aircraft, vehicle, or ship.
Cascade Engineering
The Meads Business Centre,
Kingsmead,
Farnborough,
hampshire, GU14 7SR
Telephone: +44 1252 594 121
Email: info@cascade-engineering.co.uk
Cascade Engineering is a trading name of
Cascade Aerospace Engineering Limited.
Reg. No. 05838778
