Vestas Aircoil provide heat transfer solutions that are individually designed to meet customer requirements and specifications
Vestas Aircoil has designed and manufactured charge air coolers since 1956. The first cooler delivery was for a marine diesel engine. Since then, we have developed into being the preferred partner for bespoke, high performance and reliable engine cooling systems to a wide array of the worlds´ largest engine manufacturers. Vestas aircoil is founded on traditional principles of craftsmanship, thoroughness, experience and the will to innovate and is a supplier to leading commercial players such as Caterpillar, Wärtsilä MAN Energy Solutions, WinGD, Cummins, CompAir, INNIO, Progress Rail, Wabtec, Hyundai and Mitsui. Many years of working closely with renowned, international partners has made us specialists in high quality solutions.
A strong and balanced focus on performance optimisation, environmental impact and product quality is offered to all customers and we do our utmost to live up to their requirements and expectations in the planning, development and production phases. Our “tools” are responsiveness, patience, motivation, continuous quality control –and a commitment to meeting agreed delivery times, every time. Multiple manufacturing sites effectively covering the globe allows for a close and efficient collaboration with all clients ensuring quick support and reaction times. To ensure a consistent high quality of our coolers, robotic manufacturing processes are a priority of ours, and therefore we specifically target investments in new robots for our manufacturing sites. Focusing on our core technology –efficient cooling.
With an advanced R&D Laboratory located in Denmark, the company keeps developing new technology and solutions enabling our customers to meet their targets. The R&D lab –center of excellence is a testing facility, with experimental equipment and specialised hardware/software tools. Vestas Aircoil also have a large charge air cooler test-rig able to test small and medium size coolers under operating conditions. With regard to computational infrastructure, we have dedicated workstations for numerical simulations end the expertise in setting up efficient numerical simulations.
In our quest to gain new knowledge on heat exchanger design and development, it is of importance to be part of the doctoral training, which is at the core of the MSCA-ITN programmes. These programmes aims to train engineers with high quality technical and transferable skills. Our InDEStruct.eu project together with University of Southampton is such a project. The main driver for the InDEStruct project is the distinct lack of well-trained scientists in the area of multi-disciplinary optimisation of engineering systems that involve thermal and mechanical loading caused by vibration excitation, aerothermal flow and their combined effect on structural damage.
Industry 4.0 is the next stage of major transformation enabled by digital technologies and the impacts are already being felt. It is about digital transformation of companies and the use of IoT (internet of things) in a wide range of applications. One of the concepts that exploits this fully in the area of mechanical design and manufacture is the idea of a digital twin. A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical system that serves as a real-time digital surrogate that provides an indication of the system’s performance. Data is sent to the digital model from the physical product with the digital model then able to provide performance measures in order to optimise the product. This increases the productivity of companies, as it can reduce or replace expensive and time consuming physical testing of a large number of candidate designs.
A digital twin is necessarily a multi-disciplinary concept, where well-trained scientists integrate technology that may arise from technical fields that could pose competing design constraints to provide indicators of engineering performance. InDEStruct provides such a platform for showcasing that this non-trivial challenge can be solved in an elegant and efficient manner. The InDEStruct project also identifies some of the challenges that naturally arise in a multi-disciplinary environment.
A digital twin offers the potential for companies to generate new revenue streams and provide cost savings by reducing, or eliminating, expensive laboratory testing, delivering growth with increased insight and real time data. But it can also be used for real-time monitoring of the remaining lifetime of a product. As Vestas Aircoil designs and manufactures heat exchangers for marine and locomotive engines. A digital twin could provide warning concerning heat exchanger health on board such engines, such that the risk of a train breaking down inside a tunnel can be minimised, thereby also contributing to human well-being. Such a digital twin requires multi-disciplinary understanding of systems to which the InDEStruct project will contribute.
