Manufacturing

Chinese rail firm picks PTC Mathcad

9 December 2009

China is investing heavily in high-speed rail

China Railway Siyuan Survey and Design Group Co, one of the largest survey and design organisations in China, has successfully deployed Mathcad, PTC's engineering calculation software, as its standard platform for bridge design.

Siyuan says that by using Mathcad, which leverages a range of Microsoft technologies, including the .NET Framework 2.0, it has been able to improve design efficiency and engineering calculation collaboration.

Founded in 1953, Siyuan has been involved in many high profile projects, including the Beijing-Kowloon line (the longest railway in China's history), Zhengzhou station, the biggest railway hub in Asia; the Dayao Mountain Tunnel, the longest two-way electronic rail tunnel in China and the Guangzhou-Shenzhen high-speed railway, the first in China.

Currently, Siyuan is planning and designing the Beijing-Shanghai High-Speed Railway. With the shortening of overall railway design cycles, railway construction has entered a new phase where bridge construction accounts for a higher proportion of time than railway bed construction. As a result, new railway bridge structures with higher quality requirements create more complex engineering design demands for engineers.

As an example, on the Beijing-Shanghai line, over 80 per cent of the railway length is made up of viaduct, and involves a large amount of new and special structure designs and tremendous calculation work. To manage structural analysis challenges and sophisticated drawing tasks, Siyuan’s bridge department has developed and introduced different kinds of calculation software and CAD systems.

Huang Wei, the head of software sector in Siyuan’s bridge department said: “The deployment of Mathcad has significantly elevated our engineering calculation accuracies. Previously, as the detailed designs of newly-built railway bridges are very complicated, they required manual calculation to break down and simplify complex engineering calculations, which consequently resulted in extra time and costs. Mathcad allows us to eliminate this bottleneck. We are now able to solve every engineering calculation given the mathematical expression.”

“Mathcad's intuitive calculation environment helps engineers solve complicated calculation problems, captures engineering calculation IP, improves design timeliness, and increases results accuracy. It ultimately drives innovation through faster product development, and higher quality design,” said Jake Simpson, the general manager of PTC’s Mathcad business unit.

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