Talk Abstract:
The Brompton bicycle is an iconic and beautifully refined engineering product To get where we are today took many years of engineering development using very much a traditional build, test, break approach.
Aside from the expense, sole use of this method is time consuming. Today our designers are utilising FEA tools to help reduce development time; for both new developments and for existing bike improvements.
One area Brompton have used FEA is to map the ride characteristics through frame stiffens behavior; this helps to digitally map our bike and define a baseline for new bike developments.
Bio:
Jonathan Heath is a lead mechanical designer with 18 years of product development experience in the consumer product industry.
Having developed products for Ericsson, Dyson and TomTom, he spent five years as an FEA analyst working for Vertu/Nokia helping improve product robustness through drop test simulations.
Taking his FEA experiences in a design and development environment, he’s keen to promote the use of FEA as a designers tool to help develop more robust products – quicker.