EGS India | Official Blog

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 ...