Filament Winding FEA is a web site dedicated to the topic of creating FEA models to simulate the performance of filament wound components primarily using the Cadfil® software system. This web site, the sister site cadfil.com and the registered trade mark Cadfil are owned operated by the company Crescent Consultants Ltd.
Crescent Consultants Limited (CCL) is a private limited company incorporated in England in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Island (UK). Our address from all correspondence is our registered office:
Crescent Consultants Ltd.2 SpringfieldKegworthDerbyDE74 2DPUnited Kingdom
To give a little history, Crescent Consultants was formed in 1983 by Mike Owen ( Professor of Reinforced Plastics ) and Vic Middleton ( Professor of Mechanical Engineering ), both from the Engineering Faculty of the highly respected University of Nottingham in the UK. In the period 1976–1986 here were numerous research projects into many aspects of filament winding at the University. In 1981 the composites department acquired a 5 axis CNC winding machine and considerable focus was put on exploring the capabilities of winding and developing programming techniques on VAX and other computer hardware. The company formed a technology licence agreement with the University to allow the commercial development and use of the products of some of this research work. The basic software developed on Mini and mainframe systems was re-engineered to run on the new IBM PC and was branded under the CADFIL trademark, Computer Aided Design (CAD) for FILament winding.
In 1984 saw the year of the first CADFIL sale making CADFIL was the first independently available off-line programming system of filament winding. Running on an IBM PC with MS-DOS it featured a graphical user interface. From that small beginning we are now proud to boast an extensive worldwide network of business partners and global user base in all countries where Filament winding takes place!
Professors Owen and Middleton retired from the business some years ago and today the principal shareholder and current Managing Director is Andrew Priestley who joined the company back in 1988.
Today more than 35 years later CADFIL is the worlds leading winding software system operating on the latest Windows systems. It is still subject to continuous development to meet the changing needs of our global customer base. In recent years we have developed a create deal of attention on the full CAE capability by adding sophisticated interfaces into many commercial FEA systems. This compliments our existing preeminent expertise in our CAD manufacturing production systems (CAM) capabilities and is in full alignment with modern datacentric design and data work flow.