On his profile, Tomas Narbutas describes his job as making real things from CAD models. His profile is full of these detailed and highly realistic designs. So real that if they were actually turned into physical objects, they might be less real than the original CAD models. Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking to Tomas about his career, his design process and GrabCAD.
At the moment, he is studying at Kaunas University of Technology for a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering with the intention of getting a PhD. His focus is on Control Engineering but holds a genuine interest in Fluid Mechanics. He started with AutoCAD 2006 while working as a Land Surveyor. Nowadays everything he does is with AutoDesk Inventor. “I use it for all my projects. For FEA, I use ANSYS and Autodesk Simulations Multiphysics. Also, I‘m a beginner with Autodesk 3DMax and Autodesk Alias.” Most of Tomas’s experience is in Automatic systems, wind turbines, solar collectors, electric vehicle motors and CMOS/CMUT manufacturing technology. His most current project? A liquid-cooled electric car engine.
It gets better. This is a video of one of Tomas's vertical wind turbine going from CAD design to working machine, complete with epic soundtrack.
Before, it was difficult for Tomas to make such a video and show it to other Engineers around the world. “GrabCAD community is a place where you can realize and show yourself, also, to gain experience in the design from other Engineers... it‘s a new technosocial system, which engineering solutions to move to the next level.” When its possible to take a CAD model and realize physical products, one worries about the implications of theft and copyright infringement. Tomas felt that the positive effect of sharing overcomes that possibility. We discussed possible ways of protecting engineer’s ideas. One way was to prevent new users from downloading unless they uploaded a few of their own first.
We started talking about how GrabCAD can do more of. According to Tomas, there are three things GrabCAD needs to keep on doing. Encouraging others to get better models up, making sure engineers feel appreciated for participating and sparking discussion to solve problems or coming up with new products. He suggested a ‘certification system’ to insure that models are of good quality. To a certain extent, liking and commenting help out. Tomas really appreciated the badges system, but felt like there needed to be specialized badges for competitions and more of them in general.
He was excited by the Edison’s project, now called the GC/EC (GrabCAR by Engineering Crew).
It makes the search for new engineering solutions, turning into new, interesting and useful discussions, brings together team of fans, professionals, engineers and designers. So, even the simplest solutions can become discoveries of engineering. Sometimes just enough to seed the insignificant idea, then... – NEW PRODUCT!
GrabCAD's new 3D Viewer comes a long way to helping engineers and designers get there. “I have never seen this viewer anywhere. Congratulations, it appeared at exactly the right time. I love it and I use it always.”
Thanks Tomas! The Team appreciates it!
