![]() The industrial research partner in this project does its CAD design in Siemens PLM NX and ports their models into assorted versions of ANSYS and various other in-house applications for analysis. ), and compare the cost versus efficiency of created objects ( ), assist designers while they create objects ( KBE systems are used to automatically create objects ( This knowledge is then used to assist designers while they create products within the CAD system ( It is gaining prominence as a major tool to speed up product development by capturing knowledge from engineers and designers and embedding that into software configuration ( , the knowledge-based engineering (KBE) techniques can make a substantial impact in the design of engineering products. ![]() In addition, additional benefits can be realized depending on whether a turbine, compressor, or fan blade is being designed, as the geometric complexity of each part varies from relatively simple to highly complex. A turbine engine can contain as many as of 20 different airfoils, so any improvement in the time for one design iteration will have a beneficial effect on the total design process. This process ranges from hours to days because the current methods of creating the airfoil models in the CAD system are not parametric, (i.e., the geometry is not associated with the engineering definition of the airfoil after the model is created). After revisions are made, geometric data are often reengineered and recreated within the CAD system. They are typically modeled using b-splines or NURBS, and the development of methods to do this has been ongoing for decades ( ![]() However, the complex shapes of airfoils make this difficult. For both analysis and manufacturing, these airfoils are modeled in a CAD system. Airfoil blades are a crucial component within a turbine engine, and their design covers many engineering disciplines such as thermodynamics and statics. This process is highly iterative due to the circular revisions made between design and analysis groups chasing the optimal airfoil shape and performance. The design of turbine engines involves creating, modeling, and documenting the development of airfoil geometry for turbine, impeller, and compressor blades. By using the scripting language built into their CAD package for design automation, knowledge-based engineering applications, and efficient movement of data between design packages, the company was able to significantly reduce design time for turbine design, increase the number of feasible design iterations, increase benefits from relational modeling techniques, and increase the overall quality of their design processes. This article details the work of a small research team working in conjunction with a major turbine engine manufacturer endeavoring to make better use of the underutilized capabilities of their design software. Taking advantage of these advanced capabilities would require little time and out-of-pocket expense, since the companies already own the licenses to the software. Due to the constant pressure of bringing new products to market, commercial businesses are not able to dedicate the resources necessary to tap into the more advanced capabilities of their design tools that have the potential to significantly reduce both time-to-market and quality of their products. Over this time they have continuously evolved, becoming programs with enormous capabilities, but the companies that use them have not evolved their design practices at the same rate. Computer-aided design (CAD) software and other product life-cycle management (PLM) tools have become ubiquitous in industry during the past 20 years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |