Tech@Lunch: Save time and money by manufacturability analysis of CAD designs

The topic of this session from the Tech@Lunch series is "Save time and money by manufacturability analysis of CAD designs." The ongoing digitization trend in manufacturing triggers data to flow more freely between various company departments, as well as between stakeholders throughout the value chain. In this webinar, we present a solution to bridge the ‘data gap’ that exists between divisions responsible for CAD design, and the engineering department responsible for product manufacturing at minimal cost and without failures.

During this session we present a novel software solution that leverages the knowledge from manufacturing experts and makes it available to CAD designers. Firstly, we propose a framework to formalize manufacturing knowledge, in which the degree of manufacturability can be formally expressed as a symbolic description of geometric concepts (e.g. distance, orientation and curvature) with a possible dependency on manufacturing process, machine, and material. This Knowledge Formalization Editor (KFE) enables the manufacturing department to capture, formalize and maintain in-depth manufacturing expertise.

Secondly, we present a manufacturability assessment tool that automatically exploits the KFE database and enables the CAD engineer to make an independent evaluation of manufacturability of specific designs in an intuitive and user-friendly workflow. By frontloading key evaluations to the CAD product design department, costly iterations between design and manufacturing departments can be reduced and “First Time Right” manufacturing becomes more realistic. ​