Bekaert produces steel wire in all shapes and sizes, including fine wires to reinforce car tires, heavy duty mooring cables for off-shore wind turbines and the wire you find around champagne corks. One of the ways in which these wires are produced is by taking a thick wire and pulling it through a series of dies that gradually shrink the wire diameter and make it stronger. Bekaert designs and produces its own machines to do this. My job involves everything related to these drawing machines: calculating the strength of parts to optimize their dimensions, performing experiments with new prototypes, redesigning the plumbing of the cooling circuit to prevent clogs, rethinking the control software to make the machine more intelligent…

Before designing anything, I always attempt to get a good intuition for the physics involved in the functioning of the part. You would think that this would be easy for a process that is as straightforward as pulling a wire through a die. However, in reality many factors come into play that influence the mechanics, the temperature, the friction behavior… and after hundreds of years of steel wire drawing, for some of these factors it is still unknown what their precise effect is. Therefore, truly understanding the drawing process is the most challenging aspect. Luckily, there are a lot of in-house resources, but with a company as big and old as Bekaert, finding the right information in the archives or finding the right people to talk to is a challenge in itself!

As challenging as it is to get a good intuition about the wire drawing process, figuring this kind of thing out, speculating about the possible mechanisms, formulating some simple models and reverse engineering on existing solutions is exactly what I enjoy most. Especially when the effort pays off in simple yet innovative changes in the mechanical design that manage to improve a process that has been around for so long.

Interested in becoming a mechanical design engineer or working at Verhaert On-site Consulting like Bert?