Winners were announced in the 2022 LEAP Awards yesterday in the program’s competitive Software category. Following are descriptions of the three medalists in the category.
Gold
Gates
Design Power™
Design Power significantly reduces the time it takes to design a belt drive by automating the drive design process for both application engineers and customers. Gates did this by creating extremely detailed performance models of products and working with its experienced engineering teams to codify best practices into the program and turn tribal knowledge into scalable institutional knowledge. Design Power evolved from multiple Computer Aided Engineering programs at Gates, which was combined into one powerful platform. In creating the new Design Power platform, the company’s employees spent a tremendous amount of time investigating improved methods for modeling belt drive performance to improve on the company’s industry leading capabilities and ensure that customers can feel confident in their drive’s performance —without having to resort to wasteful overdesign.
With Design Power, an engineer can easily and accurately design industrial synchronous or V-belt drive systems that fit their specific design parameters. They have the ability to layout complicated belt drives and determine appropriate belt widths. Easily determine proper belt installation tensions, calculate belt pull, and estimate the cost savings of replacing roller chain with a Gates belt drive. Design Power also adds new organizational features on par with the best digital collaboration tools for those engineers that frequently collaborate on drive design by tracking design derivatives and iterations, holding multiple designs in a single project file, and noting who made what changes along the way.
Silver
Paro Software B.V.
HydroSym
HydroSym is software created by hydraulic engineers for hydraulic engineers, specifically for designing hydraulic systems. It is a dedicated, stand-alone software solution with all the tools needed to draw flawless hydraulic schematics. With intuitive and smart features of HydroSym and extensive built in library of more than 40,000 hydraulic parts, HydroSym helps engineers save hours of design time, eliminate human error, and deliver perfect designs faster.
HydroSym’s schematics can be used with HydroMan to design hydraulic manifolds. HydroSym is a stand-alone software, making it light and quick. Intuitive features make it possible to get started and draw the first schematic in minutes. The large library of hydraulic components and symbols includes data sheets with extensive product information. This enables the engineer to automatically generate a Bill of Materials once they are done with the design. The development of HydroSym software, as well as continuing monthly updates, is done with input and feedback from a global base of users ranging from large multi-national companies to solo engineers.
Bronze
Beckhoff Automation
TwinCAT/BSD Hypervisor
TwinCAT/BSD Hypervisor, a powerful new feature of the TwinCAT/BSD operating system from Beckhoff, enables simultaneous execution of virtual machines and TwinCAT real-time applications on an Industrial PC (IPC). Optimized hypervisor integration in TwinCAT/BSD, plus matching configurations of Beckhoff hardware and software provide maximum performance for virtual machines — often called VMs — while maintaining TwinCAT realtime properties for automation.
The high-performance execution of virtual machines means different operating systems can be used on one IPC so users can take advantage of the features and strengths of each. In addition, users can enhance the security properties of the overall system by operating user environments in a modular and isolated manner. For example, TwinCAT real-time applications can operate separately from a Windows desktop environment for machine operation on an IPC. In this context, the Windows operating system runs in a virtual machine environment. Therefore, when Windows restarts, e.g., due to software updates, it will not interrupt machine control execution. This ensures optimal machine availability since Windows only restarts within the virtual machine environment and TwinCAT continues to run in the real-time context supported by the TwinCAT/BSD host.
Through the device passthrough feature of TwinCAT/BSD Hypervisor, hardware resources such as the GPU, USB ports and/or network interfaces can be explicitly assigned to a virtual machine. In this way, access to the TwinCAT/BSD system by user and/or network interfaces can be limited, creating opportunities to boost control system security. TwinCAT/BSD Hypervisor also supports operation of Linux distributions on the controller.
Congratulations to all of the winners in this year’s LEAP Awards!
Filed Under: LEAP Awards, Awards • acquisitions, NEWS • PROFILES • EDITORIALS
