Generative Design – A New Era in Product Design

Posted on July 30, 2020 by Kaladhar P

For decades, designers have been following traditional design methods that involve lengthy processes and several iterations. But today, the advancements in software have made design process simple and swift while minimizing the costs entailed. Hence, designers skill up on design best practices to reduce the repetitive design work with the help of design templates and easily implement key user-defined features adopting the right tools. This will provide them more time for innovation and new product design rather than repetitive work.

Generative Design is one such system that is transforming the way we design. CATIA software applications creates optimal designs from the set of system design requirements provided. With minimal efforts, engineers can create and simulate thousands of designs in a short span of time.

How to transform the current traditional design into a new generative design?

Simply input your design parameters such as materials, manufacturing methods, size, weight, strength, and cost constraints and receive numerous manufacture-ready designs promptly. Using AI-based algorithms, the Generative Design system outputs a myriad of design options that meet your project goals or specifications. From the multitude of options available, you can choose the one that best meets your requirement.

Why Choose Generative Design?

Generative Design system is an excellent approach that enables designers to explore an array of designs without altering the predetermined design specifications. The simulation is built into the design process, where the design undergoes hundreds of iterations before giving the output. With generative design, focus more on your vision and goals rather than doing manual design iterations. Just give your inputs, find unimaginable shapes that align with your design specifications like weight, stiffness, durability, cost, and material.

New light-weight design and assembly methodologies

Manufacturing engineers are leveraging the generative design to create accessories and tools that are lighter and stronger. They are using it to minimize part weight, optimize material usage, maximize strength, and minimize costs. The largest manufacturing companies like Airbus are utilizing generative design to redesign their interior parts with reduced weight which minimizes fuel consumption and allowing them to save big. Therefore, if you would like to optimize your material usage and reduce weight while maintaining strength and stability then adopt the generative design system to create lighter, stronger, and more cost-efficient outputs.

Check out the workflow of generative design by Dassault Systemes and how different variants are created after multiple processes.

National Institute of Aviation Research (NIAR) at Wichita State University (WSU) collaborated with Dassault Systemes to launch a 3DEXPERIENCE platform to familiarize students with emerging technologies such as Multi-Robotic Advanced Manufacturing (MRAM), additive manufacturing, and the development of new engineered materials for future aviation innovations. The WSU-NIAR designed an unmanned aerial system (UAS) or drone using the Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE platform. One of the major challenges while designing the product is the weight. The team practiced Generative Design Engineering (GDE) to optimize the UAS Gimbal assembly for the cameras and allows topology optimization and CAD reconstruction on a unified platform. With this, the team was able to reduce the vehicle weight, which added 15 to 30 min of flying per battery charge.

WSU-NIAR also leveraged additive manufacturing combined with GDE to optimize standard parts while reducing the overall part counts, avoiding material wastes, and lowering tooling costs compared to traditional milling methods

Connecting your Ecosystem on Cloud for Business Continuity

Posted on July 30, 2020September 13, 2024 by Arun Kashyap

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken everyone by a surprise right from the large-scale to small scale industries, academic institutions, and other businesses, challenging & disrupting the normality. This rapid outbreak has urged the businesses to shift from on-premises to remote work to ensure their business continuity. Social distancing is needed and to be maintained, business discussions has to be continued as always, more important to collaborate but on a virtual mode. A digital platform is the need of the hour to ensure business continuity and help mitigate the impact of such an unprecedented event or situation.

Dassault Systemes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform on cloud provides full-fledged solution for every needs of companies of all sizes with a single source of information and applications, everyone on the team can access from home, allowing them to work on their projects collaboratively and efficiently in a safe environment with secured data.

Some of the solutions & services offered by 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides the team with daily work status as if they are at office despite working from home enabling them to address these unprecedented challenges as listed below.

1. Collaborative Business Innovation

This cloud-based collaborative solution delivers the underpinning apps and services that digitally connect all users in the value stream – to establish social communities with consumers and customers to share, experiment, and innovate effectively. Businesses can power their innovation processes with transformative technologies leveraging legacy tools and systems.

Highlights

Users form social communities to engage in conversations. Users can track all the interactions by reviewing the threaded discussions and can target their responses.
Cloud-only drives help to securely store documents, allow users to access them from any device, and share documents with co-workers and collaborators across the value chain. To get reviewed with partners, suppliers, and customers, pre-registration is no longer required. Users can send them a link with a simple self-registration where guests can view designs right in a browser and provide valuable feedback. The document sharing experience is greatly enhanced on mobile devices with the 3DDrive mobile app.
Inbuilt viewers intelligently recognize CAD designs and navigate the hierarchy embedded inside CAD assembly files. Users can share entire assemblies and their peers can not only visualize the design but navigate the entire assembly with ease.
With Messaging apps, users can instantly engage in 3D collaborative experiences. Users can now augment their 3D collaborative experiences with immersive voice and video.

2. Program & Project Management on Cloud

Enables program and project managers to create a competitive advantage by delivering products from concept to market faster. Organizations can concentrate critical resources on the most profitable products while standardizing on best-in-class business processes across the extended enterprise leveraging the below features & functionalities:

i. Project Dashboards

Dashboards help management with a high-level graphical view of project status by phase, assessments, costs, benefits, issues, and risks.

ii. Project Templates

The repetitive project execution in the organization will help you to develop process standards and improve predictability. The project template contains work breakdown structures (WBS) with more manageable portions, document templates, questionnaires, bookmarks, and folder structures.

iii. Work Breakdown Structure

Program managers can breakdown the sophisticated product development activities into various manageable subprojects. The project or technical leaders are allowed to assign schedules considering project roles and non-working days, which enables them to define global project teams into phase-gate activities. Project management plays a key role in every phase of the development process from ideation to project delivery and maintenance. When a project is approved, they can update it in the WBS and schedule baselines to make sure that the work is more manageable.

3. Platform of Virtual Factory

The creation and simulation of a 3D digital twin of your factory are efficient through the Virtual Factory platform. You can quickly create the 3D layout models of machines, plants, lines, and work cells leveraging the fundamental library components from a 2D drawing or the cloud generated point from scanning the actual facility. These 3D models help you to analyze the factory flow simulation, visualize & check the machine behavior, and to connect work cells to a PLC.

4. Managed licensing services – DSLS On Cloud

The managed licensing service provides you with the ability to run certain levels (essentially, 3DEXPERIENCE) of on-premises DSLS-enabled apps. Using this mode, the specific apps which are enabled to support this mode obtain their license keys from a highly available license server managed by Dassault Systèmes, which is not installed on your premises.

Enhance Product Development by implementing APQP methodologies using 3DEXPERIENCE Platform

Posted on July 28, 2020September 13, 2024 by Arun Kashyap

In the competitive world of business, quality has been & remains to be a necessity. Quality failures can result in bringing down a business reputation quickly and comprehensively and that leads to the introduction of new products or any significant changes to existing ones, which is a particularly delicate process.

The dynamic business environment, including volume growth and increasing quality expectations, however, has made major players in the Automotive / A&D industry to rethink their strategies. The industry has decided to take the lessons learned from their experiences and adapt methodologies & technologies to address the issues.

Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) was developed in the automotive industry to follow certain procedures and techniques and is also typically required to be audited and registered to IATF 16949. This methodology is now being used in other manufacturing sectors as well and has relevance to the successful planning, production, and release of just about any product.

APQP provides structure to the product development process in a manner that ensures customer satisfaction by planning and scheduling the tasks to be done, monitoring the timely and effective completion of tasks, and communicating, escalating, and resolving issues. In essence, APQP combines project management with the use of proactive product development tools applied at the right time.

Now the challenge is to identify a system that delivers APQP in an effective & systematic way that the industries can utilize for sustainable growth & stay ahead of the competition.

With the demand for technology & system comes the need for automation across all disciplines right from the change in design to the downstream department where these changes should be automatically notified and updated across all associated documents like Process design, PFMEA, DFMEA, and PPAP value chain. The stakeholders want a robust system with no or minimal manual intervention to avoid manual errors, manipulation, and hence automate the process right across.

Customization

With the increased demand for automation, many solution providers are enhancing the OOTB functionalities through customization to bring this automation as per customer needs as ready-made packages/bundles.

Customization capabilities are playing an important role in decision making of the solution to suit the needs of every customer when it comes to APQP process mapping.

Custom program development tools/utility available as part of the system enables these customizations for every customer’s needs/automation, of course, with the help of expert consultants who are available in the market for all such expectations.

Majority of the functionalities are available as OOTB. However certain capabilities need to be customized as per requirements using the custom tools & utilities available within it.

Many solutions are available in the market to address these requirements. However, choosing the right solution that has platform capabilities, scalability and that can address diverse requirements right from design, analysis, manufacturing, quality to downstream departments is a smart & intelligence choice in terms of ROI and on a long-term business benefit.

Dassault Systemes’ 3DEXPERIENCE Platform offers solutions to map APQP methodologies covering all of its phases for any customer who is compliant & adhering to IATF 16949 or AS 9145 standards.

3DEXPERIENCE’s RFx & Project Management solution addresses the APQP requirement right from the conceptual stage to the delivery of components to its destination as shown below.

The 5 phases of APQP, from Planning, Product design, Process design, Validation to Product launch is captured as phases with associated tasks & activities with work breakdown structure in 3DEXPERIENCE Program & project management solution thus enabling the CFT members with visibility & traceability across the APQP process, including the status, resource utilization & project management.

The solution helps digitize your processes, track them in real-time, and make improvements based on data.

An example of how APQP is mapped in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is as shown below,

3DEXPERIENCE has inbuilt tools & utilities (apps) using which the APQP methodologies can be implemented successfully as per needs.

Business Benefits

By implementing APQP using 3DEXPERIENCE, the company mitigates the risks inherent in introducing or modifying a product.
Digitize your processes, real-time traceability, and make improvements based on data.
Eliminate most of the assumptions and risks inherent in the introduction of a new product or the modification of an existing one.
Improved communication with cross-functional teams/stakeholders including suppliers.
Improved decision making to work-in-progress tasks and related items such as parts across projects.
Enhanced product quality and customer satisfaction by leveraging the power of APQP as required utilizing the 3DEXPERIENCE apps.
Increased knowledge re-use through reviews of previous deliverables such as Failure Modes and Effects Analyses (FMEA), DVP & PQCs, and Control Plans

Month: July 2020