Bold title, huh? I received an email from PTC this week that included a link to an article entitled, Five Things You Should Know About 3D CAD Software. May be worth your time to read, maybe not.
But what caught my attention was the first sentence, "If you’re a design engineer working in a “typical” manufacturing company, you may be spending 60% to 80% of your time updating and optimizing old designs, or making changes for ECOs, instead of creating new designs."
They are some bold statistics. There are a ton of companies that are putting themselves at risk updating and attempting to optimize old designs utilizing physical testing or good old intuition. Whether it is a brand new design or an improvement to an existing design, the main question is -- how are design changes determined? Another question, why is a change required- did it fail in the field? If so, do you know why? How convinced are you that the failure will not happen in the future. Did you simply over-design it this time so that it will certainly not fail again? How much time are you wasting "re-designing"? For every minute you are spending "fixing things", you are allowing your competitors to gain momentum. The old-guard way of over-designing is a death sentence in a rough economy. Companies literally cannot not afford to spend a ton of time and money physically testing everything. But yet, you cannot just wing it and hope for the best. If you are reading this and are finding that you are asking one or more of the questions above, now is the time to act.
Design decisions need proof of concept. Above is a model of the natural convection in and around an avionics assembly. The thermal management of this assembly was optimized over the course of a few days where a number of "what-if" scenarios were investigated before one physical prototype was created. Once the optimal digital design was identified, a physical model was built and tested for verification. Companies that are not conducting some level of digital design studies are putting themselves at risk. The technology is available, you need to see how it can help your bottom line.
The last thing I would say to someone is simply, go purchase some software, it will solve all of your problems. Investing in Upfront CFD or CAE tools is a true investment. You are investing in a technology that has to save you money and time but most importantly provides an opportunity for innovation. There are a few vendors that specialize in creating tools that are tested and proven to solve your problem.
CFdesign is focused on solving flow and thermal design challenges. We created and own the Upfront CFD market. I'm convinced that if you are finding yourself in a tough design environment that involves flow and/or thermal design challenges, we can help. Give one of the folks on our team a call, we have pretty much seen it all and can give you a straight forward solution to your problem.
3 comments:
"The old-guard way of over-designing is a death sentence in a rough economy"
Yup, you can't afford to have a 10x safety factor resulting in unnecessary material costs. It's time to get back to real engineering!
(1) Designs are changing (or evolving) continuously not because the earlier ones are bad or have failed but because there is a constant push for "cheaper and smaller" products from customers.
(2) The concept of "over-design" or "safety factor" has an implicit assumption of a specified target (temperature in a region or stress, etc.). Often times such specifications come from customers are just pulled out of the hat and are subject to change ! So what will I really choose as my target to achieve.
fair points, but my point is that there are clearer more modern tools to make correct design decisions that can in the end make things even cheaper and smaller.
I don't agree that the over design/safety factor is taken from customer specs, I think they are shots in the dark.
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