|
Suppose that you are a design engineer who has just been given responsibility for performing structural and thermal analysis on your product. Perhaps you need to analyze the mechanical stresses on a connecting rod used in a lawnmower engine made by your company.
Nowadays companies are taking steps to give design engineers greater responsibility for performing engineering analysis. The increasingly tight integration between computer aided design (CAD) and engineering analysis applications is making analysis easier and faster than before.
Pro/ENGINEER Mechanica, for example, makes it possible to perform structural and thermal analysis on the as-designed model geometry. Model units and material are shared between the analysis and design models and one file stores all simulation and design data.
Faster optimizations. As a design engineer, you are excited because instead of waiting for finite element analysis (FEA) specialists to deliver analysis results, you can iterate much more quickly to an optimized design. You’re also able to produce better analytical models because of your greater understanding of the product and how it functions.
But still, as a design engineer, you have probably had less training in FEA than the above mentioned specialists and your other responsibilities don’t leave you with enough free time to stay current with the latest analytical techniques. You don’t use FEA every day and your level of proficiency reflects that fact.
You can easily handle many of the simpler analysis tasks. But connecting rod analysis is more complex. There are many different ways to constrain the part and apply the loads that may give different results.
Specialists show the way. Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 provides a new tool called Simulation Process Guides for Pro/ENGINEER Mechanica. This new tool makes it possible for FEA specialists to create wizards to guide design engineers in performing complex simulation and analysis tasks. Specialists can create process guides to help ensure accurate analyses by standardizing processes throughout the company, and help build a knowledge base that can leverage the expertise of the company’s experts without taking up their time.
Analysis is the perfect place to add efficiency to the process through repeatability. That’s because FEA is a fairly structured task, with predictable sequences of events, where the designer performs certain actions each and every time the analysis tools are invoked.
Specialists can create process guides without knowing a programming language. You simply cut actions from a template and paste them into an XML file. Each task triggers an analysis action — such as ‘apply constraints’ or ‘apply loading’, and so forth. Each step will carry information, such as explanatory text and images, and links to online resources. Tasks can contain sub-steps and may create their own workflows.
The wizard makes it easy for the design engineer to keep track of which analysis steps have been completed and which remain to be done. In the beginning, each step is marked with a gray box to indicate that it has not yet been performed. As soon as you complete the step, a green check appears in the box. If the design engineer should later invalidate the step, for example by removing the material definition, then a red bar appears in the box.
Using the wizard to analyze the connecting rod. For the connecting rod analysis, for example, the design engineer would first have to confirm that all materials associated with the solid model are correct. The wizard will ask the design engineer to check the materials and make sure the units of measurement are properly defined.
The wizard will then show the design engineer how to constrain the connecting rod — in this case at the point where it is attached through bolts to the connecting rod cap. Then the engineer will be asked how they want to apply the loads generated by the downward push of the piston. In this case, for this example the loads will be applied at the point where the wrist pin connects to the piston. The FEA specialist can create diagrams to show how to apply the loads, ensuring that all analyses are performed under consistent conditions.
The results of the analysis will then appear in a template defined by the specialist. The template includes a range of values with defined color coding. Any area of a part colored orange or red indicates a problem. The wizard can then go into a loop where the design engineer is asked to change the design and re-run the analysis until the problem is corrected.
As this example shows, Simulation Process Guides in Pro/ENGINEER Mechanica enable FEA specialists to provide wizards that make it easy to perform the most complicated analyses. These wizards will empower design engineers to develop better products in less time.
|
About TriStar