Improve Your Product Development Process
Today, product developers and fabricators face a unique set of challenges that stretch engineering capabilities to the limits. Consumer goods producers are striving to evolve more complex shapes and designs to appeal to continually changing customer needs and tastes. Many of the products produced are one-of-a-kind creations designed to bring a new concept to life, to increase production rates, or to lower costs.
The ability to create new machines rapidly and easily can help developers succeed. With the latest industry CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM Solutions, they can reuse previous design work to create multiple variations of a product in a single document. They can also develop and manage families of parts and models with different dimensions, components, properties, or other parameters. One siginicant time-saving strategy would be to develop 80 to 90 percent of each new product by using standard modules and components, and then using streamlined engineering processes to develop the other 10 to 20 percent in minimal time.
However, the need for speed need not compel poorly designed products. When it comes to product development, you have to get it right the first time; and if you don’t, it can mean costly expenses. Getting it right means designing a product that not only can perform well during acceptance testing, but also under normal working conditions for the products lifetime – and under environmental conditions that can vary from dusty and particulate to damp.
Gill Incorporated Design Solutions posseses the set of tools necessary to meet these challenges. We can utilize existing subsystems and assemblies developed by your company, as well as those from industry standards groups and components producers. We posses a wide range of design validation tools for evaluating a product prototype, so you can identify and fix problems before you even build your product. Additionally, we can utilize a 3D assembly model to quickly create project documentation.
Component Selection
Anywhere between 20 and 70 percent of the content of many typical product designs consists of purchased components, such as motors, drives, bearings, and hydraulic cylinders. As a result, developers can be forced to redesign purchased and commonly used components with each project. However, we have access to parts design libraries, with a wide range of standard, vendor-specific, and internal company design libraries; making the addition of new parts to your machine simple. We can easily access 3D CAD models from leading components manufacturers – saving time and improving accuracy.
Our tools incorporate ANSI, ISO, DIN, and JIS standard parts, such as fasteners, bearings, retaining rings, and gears. We can drag and drop bolts, nuts, and washers and snap them into place on your assembly in just minutes.
When the product you build is one-of-a-kind, you need to design it right before it goes into production. Our design services provide a wide range of virtual prototyping tools that can help you correctly identify and solve design problems up front. In addition to viewing the components, subassemblies, and the complete assemblies from all angles, you can examine internal components at any stage of the design process. Plus, you can move components through their full range of motion, automatically identifying clearances and detecting interferences. With the ability to find problems early in the process, you can quickly communicate design intent to your customers, manufacturing, and maintenance.
With the production-level drawing and detailing capabilities of our services, you can quickly and accurately develop drawings from the 3D design – including the automatic generation of orthographic, section, and detail views. Any change to the 3D model is accurately reflected in all project drawings automatically.
Large Assemblies
We are able to model machines with tens of thousands of components. With top-down design, we can tie together interrelated components; so if one changes, the related components will also change. We can use this powerful feature to take full advantage of the assembly model. For example, we can use 2D layout sketches as assembly skeletons to control large, complex assemblies. When we change the skeleton, the linkage and other components will automatically reflect the correct dimensions.
Routing
Our CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM tools include routing functionality that speeds up the design of pipe, tubing, and electrical routes by providing drag-and-drop placement, automatic sizing of parts or assemblies, copying and mirroring of routes, and autoinsertion of piping bends and elbows. By designing your routes in theassembly environment, we can quickly create multiple iterations to achieve the best results and avoid potential assembly problems. We can also automatically generate manufacturing drawings and material lists of routed components.
Simulation and Analysis
Often, product developers must guarantee that their products can withstand a harsh duty cycle. With our Computer Aided Design and Analysis tools we can determine the stress, strain, deformation, and displacement of components under operation, thereby avoiding field failures. With these tools we can quickly identify weaknesses in the initial design. We can generate new models quickly and inexpensively to solve problems that would otherwise not be discovered until the testing phase or, worse yet, with the customer. By determining the exact duty cycle of components, you can use lighter-duty parts or remove unnecessary material to reduce the cost and weight of the machine. We can go even as far as simulating the dynamic operation of the machine or any subsystem. Constraints and contacts are automatically created from the assembly, and forces and actuators are easily added to the machine model.
With the created model, you can perform dynamic simulations that allow you to fully understand the kinematics and dynamics of the design. You can size motors and actuators, determine power consumption, lay out linkages, optimize CAMs, understand gear drives, size springs and dampers, determine how contacting parts behave, and generate operating loads for use. Assembly and Testing as the design is generated, our system automatically maintains the bill of materials, and can export it as an Excel spreadsheet or in other formats for import into your material requirements planning (MRP) system. This information will save time and help you to avoid errors during the purchasing process. We can track a wide range of information, such as the manufacturer of purchased components, model number, size, and weight. You can generate a single bill of materials for multiple projects with numerous parts, quantities, and configurations in order to speed the transition to manufacturing and purchase in greater quantities at lower prices.
Engineering changes typically occur at a rapid rate during the assembly and testing phase. With CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM Solutions, you can avoid costly mistakes since changes made anywhere in the process automatically update all product documentation, including parts, assemblies, and drawings. By partnering with industry-leading CAM software companies, we can deliver a variety of powerful CNC programming solutions for milling, turning, and electronic discharge machining. Our CAM solutions read native geometry and are fully associative, ensuring that design changes are reflected in the CNC program.
Project Documentation
With 2D CAD tools, you end up spending a lot of time re-creating portions of the design in order to document the machine. But we can easily use the 3D assembly to quickly create production-level 2D drawings. By simply drawing a line, we can create section views. Then we can section the assembly and automatically produce the drawing. We can quickly create exploded views that describe how to maintain the machine by first arranging components in 3D, and then selecting areas of interest to define 2D detailed drawing views. Plus, we can easily annotate these views with balloons that are keyed to the bill of materials to highlight components of interest. SolidWorks eDrawings software allows you to distribute 2D and 3D drawings to customers or others who need to view them without having to install any software. With eDrawings, you can securely show drawings to customers and suppliers without revealing sensitive design data. Recipients are able to view and interrogate the drawings with enough detail to quickly understand any machine maintenance instructions.
We can go one step further by providing animations easily from parts and assembly models. We can capture assembly motion to demonstrate how the moving parts of the machines operate. We can explode or collapse the assembly to show how it fits together. We can fly the animation around the machine or subsystem, or revolve it 360 degrees on a turntable to view it from every angle. When you need to deliver maintenance documentation to your customers, our services will provide added value.
Gill Incorporated Design Solutions can help you dramatically improve the design process. With the ability to easily and quickly reuse past designs, components built by suppliers, and standards-driven parts, you’ll save time and money. Our advanced modeling capabilities not only streamline the design process, but also help you and your customers visualize the design at every stage. Plus, a powerful array of integrated analysis tools lets us validate your initial design by quickly creatingvirtual prototypes – so you get it right the first time. With our services, you can simplify the transition from design to manufacturing, while providing your customers with a higher level of documentation than ever before possible.
Visit Gill Incorporated Design Solutions for more information.
