Jet Engine Computer Aided Tube Design System

At Pratt & Whitney Aircraft a system to design tubing, produce final engineering drawings and establish data for manufacturing was developed that effectively integrates man and computer. A “wire tube” defined on a wooden mockup is fed to a host computer to perform stress and vibration analysis and check clearance to other tubes and components. The tube is then retrieved from a data base, maintained on the host, by the Computervision system to produce final drawings. The data base is then available to manufacturing to drive an automatic tube bender.