IEN: What are the major concerns facing the materials sector, and how can they be addressed?
Mirman: A key concern is material selection at the product design phase. There are invariably tradeoffs between cost, weight, performance, and reliability. New tools integrated inside CAD systems are making it easier to select materials and optimize designs. For example:
- Materials databases with a rich set of properties are integrated in some CAD tools (such as SolidWorks), making it easier to select and simulate product performance.
- Analysis Capabilities: Nearly all designers can benefit from design analysis to test and optimize products -- in terms of materials and geometry -- early in the development cycle. SolidWorks 3D modeling software includes basic, point-and-click stress analysis capabilities through the built-in COSMOSXpress Wizard.
- One particularly common challenge is selection of materials for plastic part design. MoldflowXpress is an entry-level plastics filling simulation tool that predicts whether an injection-molded part will fill based on type of material, geometry, injection location, and processing conditions. Integrated within SolidWorks, MoldflowXpress allows every plastics part designer to gain early insight into the manufacturability of plastics injection-molded parts.
IEN: How is rapid prototyping helping in the development of new materials? In product development?
Mirman: RP is affecting material development in the following ways:
- The RP equipment and material manufacturers are constantly coming out with new material for RP.
- One of the important goals is to develop materials that allow RP parts to behave as closely as possible to production parts.
- This includes more moisture and chemical resistance;
- High temperature material;
- And obviously, strength properties that approach that of many plastics and metals.
- Because the process for building an RP part is different from that used in manufacturing, even if the same material is used, the physical strength of the two parts can still be very different. For example: Sintered metal in SLS is not as strong as a casting or forged part; FDM parts in polycarbonate are not as strong as injection molded parts.
- Even if RP parts are not as strong as their manufactured counterparts, they are strong, and still provide a lot of value in limited functional testing.
RP is affecting product development in the following ways:
- Most significant thing in recent years is how much more accessible RP has become to engineers.
- Contributing factors: Broad adoption of mainstream 3D CAD; Office-friendly RP machines in the sub-$30k price range; Online access to RP services, such as Xpress3D.
- It has truly become commonplace for engineers to create physical prototypes of their design at every stage of the design process -- including early conceptual stages.
- In the past, most engineers wouldn''t get to hold components of their designs until first article (preproduction) parts where sent by the molder or foundry.
- Rapid prototypes at all design stages provide visual and functional insights, which improve everyone''s confidence in the design by tenfold.
IEN: How much progress do you see toward integrating the different segments of product development -- design, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain?
Mirman: Quite frankly, there''s still room for improvement here before reality catches up to the grand visions that vendors have offered. We''re all eager to see more "beef." Everybody wants to see a design process seamlessly integrated with the rest of the enterprise, with engineering change orders automatically updating pricing, scheduling, customer service inventory, financials, etc. Most vendors, however, haven''t delivered on the promise of tying things together. Yet it surely will come in time.
For now, instead of immersing themselves in white papers and complex scenarios, it''s time for more vendors to focus on the basics: helping time-pressed, budget-conscious manufacturers work quickly and efficiently across departments, divisions, and suppliers.
IEN: What are the R & D hotspots? Which ones are closest to commercialization?
Mirman: The following are key areas of R & D in CAD:
- Reducing the "CAD overhead" -- There are a lot of opportunities left for innovation in today''s CAD tools, to make the designer more efficient, to automate repetitive tasks, to improve usability even further.
- Huge focus on compelling users of 2D CAD systems to move to 3D. How? By making the creation of 2D drawings incredibly easy, fun, and efficient when leveraging 3D technology.
- The hot spot in parts and components is finding standard parts so you don''t have to design them from scratch. One approach is aggregating suppliers as we do on 3D ContentCentral.
- In equipment, the hotspot is using 3D CAD to support installation, assembly, and service. For example, auto mechanics should have ready access to full-motion 3D models to see how to correctly remove, fix, and reinstall a particular manufacturer''s carburetor. Or, a service technician should be able to easily see how a packaging machine on the production floor needs to be dismantled for service.
IEN: How can/will collaborative manufacturing management strategies address problems related to integrating design with the industrial enterprise?
Mirman: With respect to collaboration, there are three key problems facing manufacturers today: interoperability, communication, and finding the right partners. Collaborative manufacturing management strategies are valuable to the extent they address these considerations squarely.
IEN: Will Product Lifecycle Management play an increased role in design? Why/Why not?
Mirman: PLM will continue to play an important role, but only within the relatively few companies that can make a business case for the substantial process-specific investment. PLM is not a mainstream concept.
IEN: How is testing and inspection technology keeping pace with advances in materials design?
Mirman: In many instances, testing and inspection technologies are lagging the advances in materials design in a big and constraining way. For example, as components get smaller and smaller, they become exceedingly difficult to test and inspect. For example, one of the Achilles'' heals of the MEMS industry (in fact, some call it a critical bottleneck) is the fact that the MEMS manufacturing processes cannot be optimized to create repeatable microscopic components because nobody can test or measure the output of these processes in any meaningful or timely way.
Another example is in the area of highly reflective parts now more often seen in high-speed computer applications. Non-contact inspection devices (such as lasers and vision systems) are notoriously bad with materials with such high degrees of reflectivity. Again, without a repeatable inspection and testing process, you cannot converge on a repeatable manufacturing process.
One possible way out of this dilemma is more upfront design simulation and tolerance analysis. If one can simulate, in a 3D virtual environment, the testing of these small and/or highly reflective components (before they are produced), or simulate the effects of known manufacturing process tolerances before the design is released for production, there is a good chance that the effects of these known problems can be minimized downstream. SolidWorks has been interested in both of these areas for many years and believes that 3D simulation and 3D tolerance analysis holds promise as possible solutions to some of these important manufacturing problems.
IEN: What advances do you see in collaborative design?
Mirman: We see the Internet as a very pragmatic tool, an enabler that reduces the friction of traditional offline commerce and addresses very distinct industry pain points. The Internet is helping overcome hurdles in the areas of communicating designs, exchanging design data, finding the right partners, and incorporating standard parts in a design without having to redesign them from scratch.
For every drawing an engineer creates, 5 or 10 people outside of that engineer''s design team need to review it. Many companies, however, lack a simple, convenient way to share drawings and three-dimensional (3D) models for review and approval without going through the pain of a big enterprise software install.
Companies today are starting to transmit drawings and 3D models across workgroups, divisions, and corporate boundaries without major software installs. Our eDrawings product enables the exchange of drawings and 3D models by email in a way that lets the recipient view and comment on them with a markup pen regardless of their CAD package. In fact, the recipient doesn''t need a CAD package at all.
Another hurdle is exchanging design data effectively among different computer-aided design (CAD) systems so engineers can collaborate closely across workgroups, departments, and partner/customer/supplier boundaries. This hurdle is rising as the manufacturing world follows the pattern the auto industry set in the 1970s and 1980s. During that period, the industry moved away from vertical integration to standardization and outsourcing. In other words, automakers no longer own the entire supply chain right down to the rubber tree plants that supply the raw materials for tires, as Henry Ford did. Since other industries are outsourcing more, CAD software needs to be interoperable, and CAD vendors need to build in native interoperability with other major systems as well as to standards.
To foster design data exchange, we are building into our CAD system the capability to read other vendors'' native files. The latest version of our flagship 3D CAD software, SolidWorks® 2003, is the leader in interoperability and can read and write more native file formats than any other CAD system on the market today. We can''t enforce a CAD system standard, and our customers can''t force their partners to use a particular CAD system, but we can give our customers the ability to read and write a broad range of file formats. And while our competitors encrypt files to prevent other CAD systems from reading their files, we work hard to deliver interoperability.
Many companies that want to outsource various steps in bringing a product to market are desperately looking for compatible, trustworthy partners. For example, a company may have great marketing and distribution channels but need a certain electronics circuit board for its product. Or it might need an industrial design partner to give its product more compelling lines, or a mold maker who can quickly turn out a mold. Finding such partners isn''t easy. The ideal partner uses the same CAD system so companies can share engineering data without spending days translating or recreating it, both of which introduce errors and drive up costs.
Meanwhile, a few CAD software vendors are helping customers identify suppliers with state-of-the-art CAD interoperability tools in order to completely eliminate concerns about data interoperability. Such compatibility helps companies turn products around faster, since there''s no need to redesign parts from scratch. Scrap rates are lower because data translation problems are eliminated, and higher first-try success rates result.
The SolidWorks Manufacturing Network directly addresses these concerns. The network provides a free Internet directory for quickly finding fellow SolidWorks software users who provide a broad range of contract design and manufacturing services representing every step in bringing a design to market. These include basic design, machining, mold making, rapid prototyping, and finite element analysis. This network is a great service to users, though many CAD vendors refuse to offer one for their own customers. They''re wary of exposing their customer lists, fearing competitors will poach them. Customer loyalty really shouldn''t be a concern, however, if their customers are happy!
In other instances, companies are looking for specific parts -- bearings, motors, cylinders, pulleys, levers, knobs, or whatever -- to include in their products. Finding these standard parts can be a big challenge. Here again, CAD data compatibility becomes a critical issue, since engineers typically must design the off-the-shelf parts from scratch to check form/fit/function inside the CAD system. With access to the design in a compatible format, engineers can easily perform these analyses for the products they''re building, saving themselves time and money.
We''ve leveraged the Internet to offer 3D ContentCentral(SM), a free online directory of downloadable 3D CAD parts from leading component manufacturers. 3D ContentCentral lets companies download drawings and models of parts to check form, fit, and function. By letting people reuse instead of reinvent a design, the design process becomes more efficient. The customer gets their product to market faster and without taking hours to design a standard part from scratch. Soon, gone will be the days of the same part getting redesigned multiple times along the supply chain.