Most of the world’s biggest aerospace brands use Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform. It makes sense then, that the industry’s future workforce – those currently studying at university – uses it too.
A group of students from the HORYZN team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in Germany familiarized themselves with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform while working on a project to save the lives of people suffering from cardiac arrest.
For these people, the delivery of a defibrillator is the first step in the emergency response. Once a defibrillator is at the scene, anyone can use it easily – even if they’re not a trained medical professional. That’s because, once powered on, modern defibrillators provide spoken step-by-step instructions.
However, the time it takes for the emergency services to deliver a defibrillator at a destination can be anything up to 20 minutes, especially in remote areas. The students sought to devise a way to deliver a defibrillator much faster than this.
Their solution? An eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) fixed-wing drone that can deliver a defibrillator to the scene of an emergency twice as fast as an ambulance on the road. This rapid despatch helps increase the survival rate of a patient suffering from a cardiac arrest by up to three times.
The drone has eight coaxial motors that allow it to take off vertically and land vertically, so it doesn’t need a runway. It also has two propellers on its wingtips, which allow horizontal flight. In addition, the drone can hover for long periods so that an operator can safely lower the defibrillator from the drone to a patient.
“One of the challenges for Mission Pulse is that, because of various regulations, we are not allowed to land a drone in a city,” said Leonard Aupperle, structure lead at HORYZN. “That meant we needed to develop a winch system to lower a defibrillator while the drone hovers at 100 meters. We added a parachute to ensure that, if something does go wrong, the drone can land safely and nobody on the ground gets hurt.”
The students used the cloud-based version of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to collaborate on the design and manufacturing of this aircraft. The platform has also proved incredibly valuable in helping the students to learn industry-level manufacturing techniques.
“It has allowed me to learn how to manage a big project effectively and collaboratively,” said Aupperle. “This will undoubtedly be useful as we enter employment.”
Read the full story to discover more ways the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is supporting the HORYZN team.