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Reducing design cycle time

Suchit Jain says that integrating simulation and physical testing leads to shorter design cycles and higher quality products.

Though they perform similar roles in product development, simulation and testing have so far not complemented each other as completely as they could. They exist in their own relative vacuums, one in the physical world, and one in the virtual, not taking advantage of each others’ results and, in many cases not even believing them.

Integrated into an end-to-end design validation process, simulation and testing together yield shorter development cycles, fewer late-stage errors, and a higher return on intellectual property such as design, simulation and testing data. Factoring out habit and tradition, there is nothing to stop simulation and test engineers from working more closely. Cost barriers that divided them in the past have vanished. Today’s simulation and testing technology is inexpensive, accurate and easy to use, enabling front-line engineers to run as many simulations and tests as time allows. With the tools available, all that remains is getting simulation and testing in synch at the procedural level.

Common need creates opportunity

Just as they perform complimentary tasks, simulation and testing engineers have a common need—greater certainty. With no physical object to provide a baseline, simulation engineers are never certain that their models accurately represent the finished product. This is especially true of boundary conditions. Engineers can calculate them to a reasonable certainty, but not precisely. Without a proven baseline, the simulation analysis results are suspect.

On the testing side, engineers have a physical object to work with, but that presents its own set of challenges. Limited by the number of gauges and sensors that they can place on a prototype, test engineers are often unsure of whether they are focusing on all potential problem areas. They are also limited by their applications’ representation of data in numerical form. Testing applications depict a design as a series of abstract numerical snapshots, rather than as an object, which makes it harder to identify problem areas.

The result of this gulf between simulation (virtual) and testing (physical) is uncertainty on both ends. The solution is baldly obvious. Combine simulation’s visuals and testing precision, and you get a potent solution for perfecting designs in less time and with fewer prototypes than conventional design processes.

So what does a design cycle that properly incorporates simulation and testing look like? Much the same as today’s, with a few important differences. Engineers develop designs in 3D computer-aided design environments. Simulation engineers use CAD integrated Finite Element Analysis (FEA) applications to validate these designs. When they are as confident as they can be in their design, they turn it over to test engineers for prototyping and testing. Up to this point, the old and new development cycles are identical, but everything after this point changes.

In most existing design processes, testing engineers will take the design through production without involving the design and simulation engineers (who in many cases are the same people). They take a first pass at the design, identify trouble spots, modify the design, order another prototype and test it. They repeat this process as many times as necessary to get a production-ready design. In this process, the physical prototype, expensive and time consuming, is the vehicle for perfecting a design. That’s mainly because the test engineers know they can trust results based on a physical object, as opposed to a simulation that may or may not accurately represent the design.

Simulations lead to trustworthy results

Simulations, however, can yield equally trustworthy results without the cost of prototyping and the inefficiency thereof. The key is what happens after a company produces its initial prototype; adding a simple loop back to analysis. The first prototype can take the aforementioned guesswork out of simulation models. Design and simulation engineers can use testing data from initial prototyping to perfect their models by cross-checking their boundary conditions, for example, against the prototypes actual boundary conditions. This yields new models that, when integrated with testing data, visually displays likely trouble spots so engineers can concentrate on them. Perfecting and optimizing the design now occurs in the virtual environment instead of the physical environment. In the virtual environment, engineers can make modifications instantly at no cost, simulate its behavior to identify potential trouble spots, then zero in on and correct them with testing technology. Then, when it’s time to re-enter the physical world with another prototype, that prototype will be freer of errors and closer to production-ready.

Engineering organizations that integrate simulation and testing this way give their companies competitive edges in quality and time-to-market. The initial product will go to market sooner than competitors’ who rely on extensive prototyping. There will be fewer post-production errors because, freed of prototyping cost, engineers will simulate and test designs throughout the process instead of just at select junctures. Modifying and upgrading products is easier because engineers can work off the virtual “base” of models they created during initial product development instead of starting all over again. These gains are within reach of any engineering organization that’s ready to get a little more “real” in some areas and a little less in others.

The author is Vice President, Analysis Products, SolidWorks, Inc. He can be reached at sjain@solidworks.com.