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Digital prototyping

Digital prototyping is helping manufacturers cut costs and speed-up the entire design cycle says Abhinav Singh

Industry experts have extolled the virtues of digital prototyping to validate design ideas and support product innovation without a massive investment in R&D or physical models that at times fail and end up with manufacturers incurring big costs. There is no doubt that for best-in-class manufacturers, a major chunk of their expenditure is saved by using digital prototyping instead of using physical prototypes.

Many global manufacturers have introduced products that benefit from digital prototyping. In the conceptual design phase industrial designers and engineers often use paper-based methods/physical models or digital formats that are incompatible with the digital information used in the engineering phase. A lack of digital data, compatible formats and automation creates islands of disparate data from engineering and manufacturing processes, which means that the conceptual design data must be recreated digitally downstream resulting in lost time and money and perhaps even a lost opportunity. Digital prototyping steps in giving the conceptual design, engineering and manufacturing departments the ability to virtually explore a complete product before it becomes real. With digital prototyping, manufacturers can create, validate, optimize and manage designs from conception through manufacturing.

Revolutionizing manufacturing

A digital prototype is a digital simulation of a product that can be used to test form, fit and function and the technology is revolutionizing the manufacturing industry by eliminating the need for physical prototypes. Ajay Advani, Head- Manufacturing Solutions, Autodesk India & SAARC explained, “The digital prototype becomes complete as all associated conceptual, mechanical, and electrical design data is integrated. A complete digital prototype is a true digital simulation of the entire end product, and can be used to virtually optimize and validate a product to reduce the necessity of building expensive physical prototypes.” According to an independent study by the Aberdeen Group, best-in-class manufacturers use digital prototyping to build half the number of physical prototypes as the average manufacturer, get to market 58 days faster, experience 48% lower prototyping costs, and ultimately drive greater innovation in their products.

C V Raman General Manager, Engineering Division, Maruti Udyog Ltd. said, “With 3D parametric models now representing all elements of a vehicle, design reviews include digital mockups, which people find much easier to understand than drawings. On a recent program, digital design reviews revealed 36 issues that previously would not have been detected until the prototype stage, resulting in program delays. With the UGS PLM implementation, such delays are now avoided.” Together with PLM systems, digital prototyping ensures that vehicles get to market sooner. The company has experienced a reduction in design-to-launch time of 25%, and expects a further reduction of 15% as more collaboration with Suzuki and its suppliers is done electronically in real time.

Digital prototyping is helping battle design complexity by creating functional 3D virtual prototypes that helps optimize and differentiate designs without having to produce expensive physical prototypes. Vivek Marwaha, Country Marketing Manager, Siemens PLM Solutions said, “Lightweight and simplified part representations and powerful display and selection tools make it easy and practical to work with assemblies consisting of thousands of parts. One can focus not only on how parts fit together in an assembly line, but also how components function and interact while emulating real-world situations. The Digital Simulation and Validation capabilities of such solutions allow more innovative concepts to be reviewed quickly, while reducing direct costs associated with expensive physical prototypes.”

Additionally due to the ever-increasing product complexity and fast reducing timelines and budgets, electronic authoring and synthesis of product data are the order of the day. This combination of information technology and knowledge is called digital prototyping (DP). Rafiq Somani, Country Manager India PTC, said, “Digital prototyping has evolved over the years and has scaled new frontiers in the New Product Development (NPD) process helping in the digitization of various steps involved in product development. Until some years ago, physical prototyping used to be unavoidable. This used to be a complex and regulation driven process which required costly manpower and physical resources, taking a long time to complete.”

Through digital prototyping one can map the entire process of physical prototyping and the digital output of these computations are accurate and shareable across the value chain thereby benefiting the organization in realizing a collaborative global product development framework and achieving benefits of time and cost.

Extending 3D CAD

Digital prototyping is essentially an extension of 3D CAD technology. While 3D CAD is largely aimed at creating 3D models of parts and products, a complete digital prototyping solution enables one to check interferences, evaluate separation requirements, perform human factor studies, conduct parts in motion studies and determine whether sufficient accessibility is provided to facilitate maintenance procedures. Taken together these capabilities help to detect and fix design errors long before one actually manufactures a part.

Use of CAD independent, neutral file format visualization models of the 3D CAD outputs enables one to work in a true multi-CAD digital prototyping environment to build a Digital Mockup i.e. create a high level assembly model comprising of parts and components drawn from various CAD systems. Further design teams can quickly distribute this universally viewable prototype to widely dispersed team members, analyze its interrelated components, simulate the products operations, enable team members to annotate their concerns and rapidly incorporate alternative design concepts. This is an extended use of traditional 3D CAD technology that directly supports business initiatives such as Lean Design, Design for Six Sigma, helping reduce waste caused by defects, improving performance and manufacturability and reducing the lengthy and costly design–build-test cycles of physical prototypes.

Traditional 3D technology involves the creation of digital content with different attributes based on the process to which it is mapped. A true digital prototyping technology connects all these tools and links them logically through a set of highly customizable tools based on platform independent technologies. The digital prototyping technology is integrated, Internet based and interoperable.

The engineering and enterprise users are leveraging digital prototyping. This is in order to manage and analyze digital content (solid models, drawings, illustrations, documentation and virtual reality) based on roles during every stage of a digitized product development process. In the conceptual design phase, industrial designers and engineers often use paper-based methods or digital formats that are incompatible with the digital information used in the engineering phase. A lack of digital data, compatible formats and automation keeps this island separate from engineering and manufacturing, and the conceptual design data must be recreated digitally downstream resulting in lost time and money.

In the engineering phase, mechanical and electrical engineers use different systems and formats, and a lack of automation makes it difficult to capture and rapidly respond to change requests from manufacturing. Another problem in the engineering phase is that with typical 3D CAD software its geometric focus makes it difficult to create and use a digital prototype to validate and optimize products before they are built, making it necessary to build multiple costly physical prototypes.

Manufacturing is at the downstream end of all the broken digital processes—the disconnection between the conceptual design phases and the engineering components both electrical and mechanical results in the latter stage receiving drawings. The result is a heavy reliance on physical prototypes and the subsequent impact on productivity and innovation.

Digital prototyping enables the user to simulate how a product will look and behave before it is built. It helps to resolve the problems that are inherent in the traditional manufacturing process, even where 3D technology is used.

Indian companies are competing globally and have already made a mark with their high quality, low cost products. Global majors are in India for sometime now and in order to compete with them, Indian firms are also realizing the value of implementing digital prototyping solutions. Lots of joint ventures are shaping up and that will bring in a change in culture and practices. Adoption of digital prototyping technology will definitely grow exponentially in the near future. Although the rest of the world is a bit ahead in this, India will soon catch up. With increased emphasis on new product development for competitive advantage and sustained growth and the time to market being a critical success factor for the same, digital prototyping is being increasingly adopted. It is expected that in the near future all manufacturing companies will have to embrace this technology.

abhinav.singh@expressindia.com