EGS India | Official Blog

Sustainability Xpress could not have been released, by SolidWorks Corporation, at a better time, with the world looking at Initiatives to address Global Warming, Reducing Greenhouse Gases and Carbon Footprint. A simple add-in inside SolidWorks, it helps Designers understand the impact of their designs on environment early in the design stage. In terms of recent economic downturn how do sustainable designs result in higher profit, larger market share and improved sales for engineered products? Sustainable designs need to have Conservation as the central theme. Conservation of: Material Energy Resources Conservation of Material helps lower cost of raw material used, select material that can be recycled and evaluate alternate materials that are eco-friendly. These objectives align perfectly with the cost reduction objectives of any organization that intends to remain competitive. Conservation of Energy focuses on Energy used to produce a product as well as energy consumed by the pro...

In these days of economic challenges, companies are forced to look at ways and means of reducing costs to survive and stay profitable. Some of the immediate priorities that need urgent management focus include: 1. How to reduce product cost to sustain healthy margins? 2. How to innovate and deliver products of high value without compromising on safety? 3. How to increase an already shrinking market share? 4. How to eliminate warranty costs, product recall and re-work? The questions are unending. This is just a partial list. The answers just do not seem to be there. A careful analysis of all the questions, posed above, provides a common denominator - Design Product cost is dictated by the Bill of Materials and Drawings. Innovation and USP of a product is driven by product function and efficiencies. Increasing market share is directly related to selling better products of higher value at affordable (read not lower) cost. Warranty issues, recall and re-work relate to product not...

Feature Control Frame forms the heart of the Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing ( GD & T ) practice for engineers involved in creating, manufacturing and inspecting designs. In fact it is the greatest invention of engineering expressions in symbolic language that it is finding unilateral acceptance by the engineering community as a whole. For the un-initiated, let us considere a hole dimensioned as follows: Read from left to right, the Feature Control Frame states that "Position of the Axis of a pattern of 8 holes when produced within stated size limits, can be off-centre within a diametral tolerance zone of 0.50 when produced at Maximum Material Condition, when the part is located on Datum A as Primary, Datum Feature of Size B when produced at Maximum Material Condition as Secondary and Datum C as Tertiary references." Feature Control Frames have a characteristic symbol in the first cell, a tolerance value with a zone descriptor and material modifier (if any) as the...

Recessionary trends in markets always force customers to re-think before spending and postpone high-value investment decisions. In these days of wild economic oscillations, every company involved in manufacturing and marketing of products is faced with the following scenarios: Reduced Orders for Products Shrinking profit margin Competitive pricing from predatory products Add to these challenges, the burdening effects of increased input raw material costs, extended product development time and costly re-work due to failures, we have a problem of monstrous proportions that affects the company bottom-line and survivability. In order to stay competitive, increase market-share and provide more value for less money, product development companies need to do three things: 1. Innovate 2. Improvise 3. Implement It is well known that 80%-85% of a product cost is driven/ decided by Design. Input raw-material, number and sequence manufacturing operations, product testing, product/ design re-wo...

Part I highlighted the Fit and Form aspects of Design Validation using SolidWorks. Additional Form Validation tools are highlighted in this part. Form validation starts from the first step, namely, concept design. Form is validated all the time. Every dimension involves form validation. Shape optimization directly interacts with form and validates for optimal weight, cost or any variable that the designer uses to arrive at a design solution. Draft Analysis , inside SolidWorks, helps designer to analyze designs for form requirements that are mandatory from manufacturing considerations. DraftXpert provides a range of tools for form validation inside SolidWorks. Draft Analysis Settings and Results for Plastic Part Curvature continuity and tangency on surfaces can be checked by using Zebra Stripes Visual Display availabel inside SolidWorks. Zebra Stripes on Plastic Part Undercut Detection on parts, be they plastic or die-cast, is required tofind trapped areas in a model that cannot ...

Competitive scenarios are compelling companies take a re-look at the Designs of their Products to incorporate higher levels of functionalities and efficiencies while addressing cost and profitability pressures. It is important to delineate Design parameters in terms of and Fit, Form and Function ( F-Cubed ) and validate the same to achieve stated objectives. To recall the definitions of F-cubed, Fit addresses the interchangeability of parts in assemblies and enables assessment of the dynamic interactions of tolerances placed on features of sizes and their influences on inter-part relationships that would define functional behaviour. Form defines shape, dimensions, mass and other attributes that essentially address the design space in the context of the assembly as unique characteristics of the part being designed. Function explicitly defines the intended performance during the operational life of the part. Design Validation of Fit, Form and Function is important to achieve stat...

A nondescript Russian Genius created a monster in the mid '80s - shaking the Design World with a new Paradigm called Bi-Directional Parametricity. At a time when the CAD market was ruled by the likes of IBM and EDS, along came Samuel P. Geisberg - a mathematician - from Leningrad to the Great American Promised Land - to re-write the script and re-cast the deck with all Aces up his sleeve. Rest is history. Parametric Technology Corporation, known for its Pro/Engineer came, divided and conquered, much to the chagrin of prevailing well-established CAD Software houses. Due credit should be given to PTC for creating a new market for a new technology - driven by the passion to perform or perish. Be it Technology - Created, derived or acquired, Sales, Marketing or sheer Grit, PTC had it all. It was a great American Dream of an Enterprise that started to conquer the mind and hearts of Engineers of all hues. Sure enough, there came a time when if you were not using Pro/Engineer you w...

SolidWorks has been a peacefully co-existent, co-operative, neighbour for almost all contemporary 3D CAD platforms. Its ease-of-use combined with the ability to import, edit, update and possibly re-hash complete designs, has made it more popular among the design community. How effective is SolidWorks in terms of direct editing of imported history-free geometries while preserving history data in edit-mode? This article sets out to explore the new features in SolidWorks 2008 , that enables an Engineer to work with non-native geometry providing rich functional tools to help get the job done. As shown, 3D CAD model of a plastic telephone part, in Parasolid Format, was taken as an example to explore the functionalities available in SolidWorks 2008 to perform Direct Editing functions on non-SolidWorks geometries. The Parasolid Geometry came in fine without any errors. By just picking on the filleted surface (as shown), Instant3D functionality immediately recognized the multiple-radii ...

Exciting SolidWorks Videos have been added to EGS India Website for the benefit of the Design Engineering Community. Following Videos highlight latest trends in Design Technologies using SolidWorks . 1. Mechanism Design Functions in SolidWorks 2. SolidWorks Intelligent Feature Technology ( SWIFT ) - Benefits in Design 3. New Features in SolidWorks 2008 4. Large Assembly Management using SolidWorks 2008 5. SolidWorks 2D Drawing Creation - Capturing Design Intent Contact EGS India - SolidWorks Reseller in Chennai, Coimbatore INDIA for your Design Requirements.

Of late the CAD Market has been active with discussions on the 'new' technology marketed by Siemens as Synchronous Technology - a new paradigm in Mechanical CAD. Some CAD gurus term it revolutionary, path-breaking and a panacea for the ills of Parametric Technology ( not PTC !), while other seasoned users and I-have-seen-this-often CAD specialists want to be cautious and adopt a wait-and-watch approach. One of the common thread underlying the discussions on Pro's and Con's has been that Parametric approach has been beset with two issues , namely errors during regeneration and time taken to edit a design having a long history-tree. Hence history-free modelling approach seems to offer a solution to these issues. Instead of taking extreme stand with respect to either History-based or History-free approach, a middle path trying to capitalize on the benefits of both approaches seems to be emerging. This is definitely a positive trend for the 3D CAD Industry and the user ...

EGS India has launched the June 2008 Edition of its Newsletter for the benefit of the Engineering Design community. Interesting articles on Time Management for Projects, Finite Element Thought for the Day, Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing ( GD & T ) - Usage of GD & T Symbols, Kinematic Analysis of Ingenuous Mechanism Designs using CosmosMotion are provided in this recent edition of EGSIndia Newsletter. Thought provoking article in the 'Did You Know' column and Benefits of a recent Design Seminar conducted by EGSIndia - Reseller of SolidWorks, Cosmos, PDMWorks in Chennai, Coimbatore, India are highlighted. Please visit following web pages for more information: http://www.egsindia.com/ index.php http://www.egsindia.com/ June-08/NS-June- 08-newsletter.html http://www.egsindia.com/ gdandt.html

EGS India has been offering a Comprehensive Practical course on Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing per ASME Y 14.5 (2000) standards for Organizations in India. In addition to teaching the basics of GD&T for participants, EGS India has been providing hands-on training with practical problem solving to customers having wide-ranging applications from Consumer products, Defence, Automotive, Machine Tool to Power and Process applications. Contact EGS India at info@egs.co.in for more details on GD&T courses for Corporate Requirements.

EGS India has launched a Product Design Newsletter to disseminate information, knowledge and experiences in the areas of Engineering Design, Simulation using Finite Element Analysis, Best Practices in Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing ( GD&T ), Analysis to test correlations, Recent Trends in CAD & CAE Technologies. Online Newsletter can be found by accessing: http://www.egsindia.com/NS1/newsletter.htm Highlights of the Newsletter include: 1. Topics in Product Design including innovations, new concepts and technologies 2. Success stories of CAD & CAE Implementation 3. Articles on Finite Element Analysis 4. Experiences in Product Design & Simulation 5. Seminars and Product Launches in SolidWorks CAD & Cosmos FEA 6. Training information and articles on Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing