Rapid changes in technology have created an environment where the market life of a product has decreased due to the introduction of new and more advanced products by competitors. To maintain a competitive edge, companies have to meet the challenges of decreasing the development product time cycles to a level comparable with product life without losing quality.
| What is Product Life Cycle Management (PLM)?
A manufacturing company exists to sell products. However, like everything else in life, products too have a certain life. Each product goes through this life cycle and eventually dies out. Products that were once a household name disappear from the market as they enter the decline phase of their life cycle. The long term survival of a manufacturing company therefore depends on the ongoing development of new products. PLM is the method of managing the entire life cycle of a product - from the initial concept through development and manufacture to discontinuing or replacing the product with a better one. Design engineers of today use CADD for product design and manufacturing. |
CADD is one such tool that progressive companies use today to reduce product development time. It is an acronym for Computer Aided Design and Drafting and offers solutions to most engineering drawing and design problems. It also allows for handling increasingly complex engineering projects. Before CADD, design engineers and manufacturers had to expend a lot of effort in testing a new product / object. Today, several industries and most disciplines related to engineering use CADD to enhance their productivity and reduce costs.
Digital / Virtual Prototypes
A prototype is a functional model of a design process. Prototypes enable designers and engineers to explore design options, determine different parameters, finalize part tolerances and in general to determine if a new design works as intended. CADD software enables design engineers to produce virtual prototypes that simulate real life systems. In the context of this article, virtual prototyping, digital prototyping and digital mockups are used synonymously.
Digital or virtual prototyping is an engineering discipline that involves modelling a part or a system using software. These digital mockups are simulated virtually to observe its behaviour under real world operating conditions. Since the entire simulation process is digital, refining of the design is easier to manage. It is important to understand that virtual prototyping does not produce a physical object. The testing and evaluation of the object / system's properties is carried out only using software (like Altair HyperWorks™, for example). A solid model digital prototype functions much like a physical prototype, is often just as accurate as its physical counterpart, and can be subjected to real world analysis and simulation. Once the validations are completed, rapid prototyping printers (3D printers) are then used to actually create the object, which is a 3D solid model.
There are several benefits of using digital mockups in the engineering design process vis-a-vis creating a 3D object using 3D printers, especially at the validation stage. Virtual prototypes provides companies with a deeper understanding of product function, enables the simulation of product performance as part of a complete system, offers interactive and automatic design optimization based on requirements and assists other areas of product development and coordination.
Digital prototyping can support all members of a product development team and help communication. Designers, engineers and manufacturers use digital mockups to explore ideas and validate designs quickly.
Once a functional, virtual product model has been created, it can be tested in various ways without building a physical model. As a simple example, if a 3D virtual prototype of an assembly exists, then it is possible to apply an assembly simulation package to obtain a full mechanical and kinematic simulation of the proposed assembly sequence, allowing potential insertion paths to be checked for access clearance and clashes. Digital prototyping also enables engineers to measure miniscule components that ordinarily would be difficult to instrument without affecting test conditions. A few industrial uses of virtual prototyping include ergonomic design of automobiles, aero planes and assembly workstations.
Advantages of Virtual Prototyping
Some of the industries that use digital prototyping include the automotive, ship building, aerospace and defence. Increasingly, digital prototyping and 3D printing (rapid prototyping) is also used in medical science, especially dental labs and prosthetics. In the US, Chrysler and Boeing were one of the first companies to understand the usefulness of digital prototyping and used it to their advantage.
Virtual Prototyping software tools can be classified on the type of mathematical hypothesis used:
It is the broad usage of computer software to aid in engineering analysis tasks. These tools are used to analyze the robustness and performance of components and assemblies. CAE virtual prototyping encompasses simulation, validation, and optimization of products and manufacturing tools. The common parameters that CAE simulates in mechanical engineering include pressure, temperature, momentum and interactions within components. The automotive industry is one of the leading sectors that uses CAE based digital prototyping for virtual product development.
FEA is a simulation technique based on discrete mathematics. FEA applies the Finite Element Method (FEM) to solve mathematical equations related to engineering design problems. It is used extensively for evaluating structural performance and for prototyping virtually in almost every engineering discipline.
Computation fluid dynamics (CFD) is a science that produces quantitative predictions of fluid-flow phenomena based on the conservation laws (conservation of mass, momentum, and energy) governing fluid motion. It is an engineering tool used to simulate the action of thermo-fluids in a system and is used by many industries for conducting virtual experiments, prototype testing and parametric studies.
CAM based prototyping allows design engineers to create simulations of new facilities and fabrications superimposed within the environments where they will be erected. It thus facilitates integration of real processes into the virtual environment.
Each method has its merits and demerits; which tool should be used for digital prototyping is based on the requirement of the system to be developed.
While digital mockups are predominantly used in the U.S and Europe, India and China are catching up fast in their use. Many manufacturing companies in India have already harnessed the prowess of virtual prototyping tools, and the number of such companies is increasing constantly.
Digital Prototyping Software
Altair, Dassault Systèmes, PTC and Autodesk are a few leading players in the virtual prototyping field. Altair HyperWorks® especially is popular with manufacturing companies in India and elsewhere as it offers one of the most comprehensive open architecture CAE simulation platforms in the industry, coupled with latest technology.
As the popularity of digital prototyping grows, all these software developers are offering niche modules that focus on a specific task. Altair HyperWorks for example offers modules like HyperView™, HyperMesh™, OptiStruct™, HyperGraph™, etc. that analyze a specific parameter of the system under consideration.
In Conclusion
Products are becoming complex by the day, and the competition is always at the manufacturer’s heels. Costly design errors and late detection of problems is unacceptable, and testing cannot wait for the physical prototype to be complete. Virtual / digital prototyping is an indispensible tool today in properly optimizing the PLM of a system. As such, a developing country like India has huge potential for virtual prototyping services.