Athletes get obsessed with their equipment. And with good reason. The style of ski or bike they use can mean the difference between winning and losing in split-second finishes.

"Innovation is paramount in this industry," said Roland Alonzo, who designed a new mountain-bike suspension system. "The technology is fast-moving and can change every six months."

The 2stage mountain-bike suspension system designed with 3-D CAD by Roland Alonzo is active in proportion to pedal force. The suspension system doesn't switch abruptly between riding modes.

He should know. After many years of riding mountain bikes, Alonzo had an idea to help the bikes ride easier, he said. He fooled around, sketched his idea in 2-D programs, and created the final digital prototype in a 3-D CAD package.

Rear-wheel suspension systems are a fairly new addition to mountain bikes, Alonzo said. They help bikers ride over rough terrain and race downhill.

But the rear-suspension bikes can be hard to pedal because these suspensions have two riding modes—one for flatter terrain, one for bumpier, he said. The transition between these two modes can be abrupt. And because it happens automatically, the rider can't control it.

Alonzo's 2stage system is always active in proportion to the pedal force. So the bike ride is more pedal-efficient and the suspension system doesn't switch abruptly between modes, he said.

Alonzo created his first 2-D sketches in Adobe Illustrator on a Mac. To create a 3-D wireframe model, he imported the 2-D graphics into the 3-D CAD modeler Rhinoceros, from McNeel North America of Seattle.

One medical modeling company uses CAD software to make sure its models are anatomically correct—down to the smallest detail.

The company, Zygote Media Group of Lindon, Utah, builds and sells detailed 3-D models of the human body that are based on data from magnetic resonance imaging and computerized tomography.

Models include the human skeleton, heart, arteries, nerves, and muscle tissue. Zygote's customers use the CAD models in developing products for biomedicine, entertainment, athletic gear, and video games, said David Dunston, Zygote executive partner and designer.

The company's CAD models have appeared in movies like Hollow Man, in television commercials, and on The Discovery Channel. They've also made appearances in a host of textbooks, university classrooms, trade journals, and corporate training videos, Dunston said. A biomedical company may use the 3-D heart models to develop stents or a skeletal model to design a brace to straighten a crooked spine.

"The software allows us to apply detailed MRI and CT scan data we've generated to create extremely precise solid models," Dunston said.

The company uses SolidWorks CAD software to build the models.

Computer simulations can be cheaper than crash tests, but they do have a downside.

According to Silke Sommer, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Mechanics of Materials in Freiburg, Germany, conventional simulations don't fully take into account the rupture of auto body joints, rivets, and seams. The ability to model a splitting seam is important because a midsize car is held together by about 5,000 spot welds, nearly 400 feet of adhesive joints, and numerous rivets, Sommer said.

If those joints or welded areas were to split in a collision, a part of the auto body could penetrate the vehicle and injure occupants. The Fraunhofer team has created a computer model that depicts what would happen to those areas during a collision, said Sommer, who headed the project.

To populate the model, research engineers first had to take a step back and examine the automobile's individual joints in a tensile testing machine. For instance, they analyzed what happens to a spot weld under tensile, shear, bending, and torsional loading conditions.

The research engineers inserted the various joint models into the crash model. Researchers can now model their own simulations by adjusting the joining method and the design of the body in white to their own needs.

By making educated guesses about how best to traverse unfamiliar terrain, robots developed at Purdue University were able to cut their navigation time.

Robots often rely entirely on sensors to guide them. But the sensors are sometimes inaccurate, and the robot can stray slightly off course, said C.S. George Lee, a Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering who specializes in robots.

Lee said he's at work on robots guided by a software algorithm that creates a map the robot can reference to predict what lies ahead.

C.S. George Lee (left), a Purdue professor of electrical and computer engineering, and doctoral student H. Jacky Chang operate robots that follow a map to traverse unfamiliar terrain.

As you might expect, the more repetitive the environment, the more accurate the prediction and the easier it is for the Purdue robots to successfully navigate their environments.

"For example, it's going to be easier to navigate a parking garage using this map because every floor is the same or very similar," Lee said. "The same could be said for some office buildings."

The robots also rely on information from a laser rangefinder and odometer to navigate.

Conventional wisdom holds that you can't reinvent the wheel. But a wheel's intelligence is an altogether different case.

Scientists at the University of Portsmouth in England are at work on auto wheels that automatically adjust their ride to the road. The wheel will be used on the prototype electric car made by PML Flightlink Ltd. of Fareham, England, a company that designs electronic motors but is now branching out to the electric car.

The wheels rely on tiny on-board microcomputers that perform 4,000 calculations per second and communicate digitally with each other. With the microcomputer as brains, the wheels automatically make calculations and adjustments according to traveling speed and road conditions, said David Brown of the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Industrial Research. He's part of the research team.

"Traditional suspension means the vehicle dips when the wheels detect poor road surfaces, and you get a bumpy ride, while a tight corner means the drag will slow the vehicle down," Brown said. "Electronic traction control and suspension will counterbalance this kind of drop and drag effect, but the driver won't even know it's there. It means a faster car, but a safer one."

Preschool children with disabilities are too small to sit in a powered wheelchair, which they often can't operate properly anyway. But they still need a way to get around.

Medical Engineering Resources Unit, a charitable organization in Carshalton, England, that develops medical products for children, has created Bugzi, an electric wheelchair to be used indoors by disabled children younger than six.

Bugzi is small and maneuverable and can be transported in the back of a car. It's also adaptable to a wide range of sizes and abilities and the seat can be adjusted, said Peter Swann, head of product development for Medical Engineering Resources.

To help design the chair's compound curved surfaces, engineers at the company used the 3-D CAD package Inventor from Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif.

Medical Engineering Resources Unit began more than 40 years ago as the brainchild of a lecturer in engineering design. The organization's story and activities are published on its Web site, meru.org.uk.

When they are perfected, some small submarines will move through water as a jet moves through air.

For the past decade, Hawkes Ocean Technologies of San Francisco has been at work on a class of small, maneuverable submarines that can be piloted through the water to a desired depth using controls, wings, and thrusters similar to those of jet aircraft. They're meant to mimic flight—underwater, according to Adam Wright, a marketing manager at Hawkes Ocean Technologies.

The design and engineering firm is using analysis software to help in the development of Hawkes's winged submersibles.

Engineers are now designing a two-man craft with lightweight, carbon-reinforced composite material to replace the aluminum parts of the previous model. The exterior skin is made of layered fabric composite. The submarine is rated for a depth of 3,000 feet.

To determine the stresses in the complex geometries of the composite parts—which must withstand pressures of nearly 700 pounds per square inch—the company uses computational fluid dynamics software from Ansys of Canonsburg, Pa. The software defines the flow of water around the craft. Engineers study the analysis results to design the craft for minimal hydrodynamic resistance and maximum lift so the submarine can dive and maneuver under water, Wright said.

Machine tools tend to heat up after they've been running several hours. That can affect their accuracy and makes designing them very tricky.

Mori Seiki Co. Ltd. of Nagoya, Japan, has enlisted the aid of a supercomputer to help speed its design process and generate more accurate models and simulations of its tools.

Digital Technology Laboratory Corp. provides engineering consulting services for Mori Seiki and houses the new Linux Networx LS-P supercomputer. The consulting service uses a number of computer-aided engineering applications to analyze the performance of machine tools as digital prototypes.

After running continuously for several hours, the accuracy of machine tools can be affected by changes in their operational temperatures. So DTL studies the effect of temperature change over time. Traditionally, DTL carried out analysis on standard desktop computers; however, the need for higher-fidelity models and simulations, coupled with the need to complete jobs faster, necessitated an investment in a supercomputer, said Zach Piner, director of mechanical engineering.

Algor Inc. of Pittsburgh is now an Autodesk Inventor 2008 certified application that operates in tandem with Inventor.

Ledas Ltd. of Novosibirsk, Russia, has released an upgraded version of its 2-D geometric solver, LGS 2D 2.0.

Vistagy Inc. of Waltham, Mass., has upgraded its Seat Design Environment to 2.0. The 3-D development environment is tailored specifically to the design and manufacture of seats for the transportation interiors industry.

Wolfram Research of Champaign, Ill., is shipping its Parallel Computing Toolkit 2.1 software for those using Mathematica and more than one processor.

Centric Software of San Jose, Calif., has released Centric Product Sourcing, which helps manage new product sourcing, including supplier lifecycle management.

Applied PLM Solutions of Leicestershire, England, is now selling its anthropometric software, Ramsis, in England. The software is a 3-D CAD ergonomics tool, which was designed in cooperation with the German automobile industry for the development of vehicles and cockpits.

MSC.Software Corp. of Santa Ana, Calif., has released SimEnterprise R2, an enterprise simulation application that includes the developer's SimXpert, SimDesigner, and SimManager applications.

DotSoft of Ewing, Ky., has a new release of its spreadsheet import tool, XL2CAD. The product adds support for Windows Vista, AutoCAD 2008, and Excel 2007.

Sofelec of Munich, Germany, has released VPindex, which allows hundreds of scanned drawings or 2-D CAD files to be indexed and saved to a database.

CADgasm.tk of Bakersfield, Calif., has released CADgasm, which is an AutoCAD program that helps with many aspects of drafting, including dimensioning, annotation, and commenting.

LMS of Leuven, Belgium, is shipping LMS Virtual.Lab Fast Trim, a modeling and simulation program that assesses the acoustic behavior of multilayer acoustic trim panels.

Seemage Inc. of Newton, Mass., has released Seemage 4.2, which produces product documentation and service procedures from 3-D CAD systems.

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