Everyone loves beer, right? Check out this awesome blog post that was written by JP Emanuele, SOLIDWORKS Electrical Territory Technical Manager, and learn about brewing with electricity!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or maybe in your parents’ basement), you can’t help but notice the incredible boom within the North American craft brewing industry. I was curious so I performed a simple search using www.brewerymap.com, and found that there are 249 breweries within 100 miles of our SOLIDWORKS headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts. That’s amazing!
To put it slightly more into perspective, there are so many breweries opening up in the United States, that there is actually a shortage of hops, but we’ll save that topic for another time.
Sometimes, when I get the chance to see a brewery in action, I give myself a sly smirk, pointing to things around the room with a slight nod of my head, and think, “look at all this awesome equipment,” and “that thing was designed in SOLIDWORKS, and that was designed in SOLIDWORKS, and that, and also that.” This tasty beer I’m holding in my hand wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for SOLIDWORKS.
So I came up with an idea. What’s the one thing all of these breweries have in common? It’s that they all started in someone’s kitchen, basement, or garage – just like I do when I break out my own home brew kit. So I decided to take my love for SOLIDWORKS and my interest in craft brewing and combine them to create a SOLIDWORKS Electrical project, as well as an entirely new SOLIDWORKS assembly. I call it – The SOLIDWORKS Brewery.
It’s a digital brewery that we can use to mock up new layouts for the home brewing floorplan. We use SOLIDWORKS Electrical to route the wires, cables, and hoses for the control cabinet and pumps, or render our assembly in SOLIDWORKS Visualize to create an extremely realistic view.
And down the road, I plan to use SOLIDWORKS Simulation to run scenarios on the kettles and heating elements, use SOLIDWORKS PCB to create a new circuit board for more intelligent automation, even use Weldments on our brewery tables, Sheet Metal on our exhaust duct, plus several other features as well. Sounds cool right?
I will also be conducting a 22-Minute Webinar talking about this home brewing system and how you can take advantage of the features built into SOLIDWORKS Electrical and apply them to your own projects. To register, use the link here. The webinar is scheduled for March 17th, 2017; 11:00AM and 2:00PM ET (Happy St. Patrick’s Day!). Click here and register today!
Still looking for more? Here’s the best part. In a few weeks’ time, my SOLIDWORKS teammates and I will be brewing an actual beer using the same electric brewing system you see here in our digital brewery. We will be producing a video mini-series that walks us through the various stages of the brewing process while we also cover several features, tips, and tricks related to SOLIDWORKS Electrical.
Read the full blog post by JP Emanuele here
