Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin Inc. (RWDI)

The Challenge

Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin Inc.(RWDI). Founded in 1972 and headquartered in Guelph, Ontario, RWDI has become the leading world provider of wind-related engineering services. The company offers a complete range of wind engineering, environmental air quality, and noise management services to leading architectural, mechanical engineering, and structural engineering firms, as well as to private and public facility owners. RWDI projects include the world’s tallest buildings – Taipei 101 in Taiwan, and Burj Dubai in the Middle East – and the Freedom Tower at New York’s World Trade Center site. RWDI needed to automate the manual process of installing pressure sensors on wind-tunnel test models.

The Solution

Because SolidWorks CAD software has a flexible architecture and open SolidWorks API, RWDI engaged the services of Sungrace Software to develop a customized application, known as eTAPS, for automating the modeling and placement of wind-pressure sensor taps in SolidWorks. By customizing SolidWorks, the firm increased its modeling efficiency by 15 percent, shortened client delivery times, decreased project costs, and extended its capacity to perform wind-tunnel tests.