Computer simulation helped Ford Motor Co. adapt the design of an intake manifold to fit several new, distinct vehicles. The automaker would save money by using one manifold on several models rather than making separately designed manifolds for each one.

Engineers needed to create a design compact enough to fit the envelope of the smallest vehicle and quiet enough to meet the noise, vibration, and harshness requirements of the luxury models. They had eight weeks to redesign the manifold.

Had the engineers used physical testing methods alone to determine the best design, they wouldn't have met the deadline because it takes a week or two to build and test a single design concept. And testing alone doesn't provide enough information needed to improve the next design iteration, said Ed Hernandez, CFD supervisor at Ford.

The engineers instead used computational fluid dynamics to simulate airflow through a series of proposed designs. The simulations gave them enough information on flow velocity and pressure at every point inside the proposed designs that it became easy for engineers to detect problems and correct them, Hernandez said. Engineers imported computer-aided design information from their CAD program, I-deas, from EDS of Plano, Texas, into CFD software from Fluent Inc. of Lebanon, N.H.

Everyone involved in the design process reviewed the CFD results as soon as they were available, Hernandez said. Together they analyzed each successive design change in only one day, which he said was a tenfold savings in time over the traditional, physical model approach.

"Engineers completed 12 design iterations, each a major leap in performance of the one before, because they were designed to address a specific flow condition revealed in analysis," Hernandez said.

The final design meets all requirements for every vehicle model on which it will be used. It saved Ford considerable money by doing away with the need for separate intake manifolds and their individual machining lines, molds, and inventory, Hernandez said.

Two regional aircraft designers—Alliance Aircraft Ltd. of Martinsburg, W.Va., and Harbin Aviation Industries of Harbin, China—are using computer-aided engineering technologies in the design of small jet aircraft. The CAE systems allow engineers to design, simulate, and test various airplane components and assemblies. The two aircraft makers are working together on a new series of planes called the StarLiner 100.

The software is also intended to bring safe jets to market with reduced costs, said Earl Robinson, Alliance's chief executive officer. The StarLiner 100 will consist of planes with seating configurations of 33, 44, and 50 seats. The first flight is scheduled for 2003, with initial deliveries to customers in China planned for 2004. The company hopes to sell 300 of the aircraft within China.

Engineers are using the computer-aided design software Catia from Dassault Systemes of Paris, as well as Visual Nastran simulation and analysis software from MSC.Software of Los Angeles, to design and analyze the aircraft.

Restorative drying companies move into high gear whenever a flood occurs. Often, they can save a house if they begin drying it within 48 hours of the flood to prevent mold and mildew from destroying walls, carpets, and floors.

Dri-Eaz, a maker of large dehumidifiers, uses Cadkey to make photo-style drawings of its products from the CAD data.

Once restorers drain or pump water out of a flooded building, the walls, carpets, and furniture remain saturated. To dry the building and its contents, the restorers must move large volumes of air to speed evaporation, then dry the air as the moisture moves into it. One way to dry the air is to move drier air into the premises and the saturated air out. But after a flood, ambient air is often saturated as well. To take the moisture out of saturated air, restorers use dehumidifiers.

Dri-Eaz Products Inc. of Burlington, Wash., makes a DrizAir line of dehumidifiers protected by a molded high-density polyethylene housing. The humidifiers were designed using the CAD program Cadkey, from the company of the same name in Marlborough, Mass., said Larry White, a Dri-Eaz design engineer.

His team used a photorealistic rendering feature included in the software, which produces from the CAD program a lifelike print of the finished product before it's even produced. The renderings are sent to the marketing group, so members know what the product will look like and can include photos in marketing materials, White said.

Krebs Engineers of Tucson, Ariz., wants to double annual sales in five years, produce designs twice as fast, and cut order-to-delivery time by at least 70 percent.

To meet those goals, the company has had to re-engineer the way it has operated for almost a half-century. To that end, Krebs installed product data management technology to improve engineering efficiency and speed the flow of technical information across the company.

Krebs is a supplier of centrifugal separators, also called hydrocyclones: equipment that classifies slurry mixtures of solids and liquids according to density. The products are used in the mining, pulp and paper, chemical, pollution control, power generation, and dairy industries, among others. Each hydrocyclone is engineered for each job, said Mark Holmberg, the engineering manager at Krebs.

The company recently installed PDM software called SmarTeam from SmarTeam Corp. of Kfar Saba, Israel, to manage product design and document files for the company's Catia CAD system. Another module processes engineering change orders and other company workflow information. Krebs plans to expand the technology's capability by installing other modules in the future, Holmberg said.

Before implementing the PDM technology, Krebs used a manual document filing and tracking system that had users hunting through file drawers and going from one designer to another to locate needed documents, Holmberg said.

The technology should help Krebs meet its five-year sales goals as well as cut its order-to-delivery and design time, he added.

The story is that Al Moen, inventor of the single-handed faucet, started on the problem in 1937, after he scalded himself at an old-fashioned two-spigot sink. The first one of his faucets went into production 10 years later.

Faucet maker Moen of North Olmsted, Ohio, recently adopted an upgraded version of Pro/Engineer CAD software called Pro/Engineer Wildfire.

The company he founded, Moen Inc. of North Olmsted, Ohio, doesn't have that kind of time any longer. The challenge at Moen today is to compress product development time, said Mike Brattoli, a senior product design technician at the company.

"Sometimes, it took us three to four years to design a set of bath fixtures with one finish, and the market was fine with that," he said. "Today, we design an entire bath suite in 15 different finishes in 14 months or less."

Consumers are now asking for more fashionable faucets than were available in the past, Brattoli said.

The company uses Pro/Engineer CAD software from PTC of Waltham, Mass., for product design. It recently added the Pro/Engineer Wildfire version, which includes 450 enhancements, according to the software vendor.

The enhanced version allows the faucet maker to produce more concept designs before actually manufacturing a product, he said.

A researcher at Pennsylvania State University in University Park has developed a faster method than is currently available for efficient sharing of widely distributed Internet resources, such as Web services, databases, and high-performance computers, according to the university.

Jonghun Park, an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences and Technology, who proposed the protocol, said that the new technology speeds the allocation of Internet resources tenfold.

In the near future, demand for collaborative Internet applications will grow, Park said. Better coordination will be required to meet that demand and this protocol provides that.

Internet computing, which would make use of such a protocol, is the integration of widely distributed computational and informational resources into a cohesive network. This allows for a broader exchange of information among more users than is possible today. One example is grid computing that connects much like an electricity grid to harness available Internet resources to support large-scale, scientific computing. Right now, the deployment of such applications is limited because they require a more sophisticated method of coordinating resources. Park said his decentralized protocol could provide that.

His protocol uses parallel rather than serial methods to process requests for applications. This helps with more efficient resource allocation and helps solve the problems of what's called livelock, caused by multiple concurrent Internet applications competing for Internet resources. His protocol lets Internet applications choose among available resources.

Computer science students at the University of Iowa in Iowa City use computer programs they've designed to create complex, three-dimensional virtual line sculptures that can be viewed from several different perspectives, said Joe Kearney, who teaches the students.

The students' project is an exercise in building and manipulating data structures and involves using a set of simple components like lines, waves, spirals, circles, and spheres to build aggregates that grow increasingly complex. As his students elaborate and expand their sculptures, and build them up layer upon layer, Kearney said their programming becomes more sophisticated and they gain more command of the idea of abstraction.

The object is to build technical skills hand-in-hand with developing creativity, to get students' left and right brains working together, he said.

Volvo Motor Graders of Goderich, Ontario, recently found that welds near the fuel tank cracked in a small number of its graders while they were used to plow snow.

In order to correct the problem, Volvo first needed to understand the root cause of the failure. Were the welds bad? Were material property vibrations a part of the problem? Were the cracks the result of cold weather? Did plowing snow and ice contribute to the cracks?

Volvo employees enlisted ITI Manta of Milford, Ohio, to help them find the cause of the problem, said Matt Greulach, a senior project manager at that company, which offers mechanical engineering, testing, and analysis services.

Greulach and his partners knew that cracks can usually be traced to metal fatigue resulting from a combination of system dynamics, complex dynamic loading, and duty cycles. They first focused on the effects of the tire chains used to improve traction in snow and ice. They found the chains affected dynamic vibration and stress levels on some of the welds that secured the fuel tank to the frame, Greulach said.

Once ITI Manta's engineers isolated the cracking cause, engineers at Volvo Grader incorporated structural modifications into their grader design to fix the problem. The modifications shifted the grader's vibration frequencies and lowered strain levels in the fuel-tank mount region, Greulach said.

A maker of machinery and equipment for flexible packaging, Windmoller & Holscher of Cologne, Germany, is installing new computer-aided design and product lifecycle management software that works together. EDS of Plano, Texas, provides the two software packages.

The equipment maker produces blown and cast-film extrusion equipment, along with flexographic and rotogravure printing presses, paper and plastic industrial sack, bag, and carrier-bag machines. It also makes form-fill-seal packaging systems.

The company is now installing the two computer-aided design software programs: Unigraphics NX, the CAD system, and Teamcenter Engineering, the PLM software.

Robert Scalara, who owns the Cutting Edge Manufacturing Corp., a Phoenix design fabrication firm, employs two mechanical engineers to do contract work for customers. Those customers range from architectural firms and automotive manufacturers to aerospace businesses and other machine shops.

"We take anything on, from an idea needing design work to production jobs or reverse engineering from a part," Scalara said. The shop also recently began making its own product, a utility and pocket knife called the Superknife.

"There were just two of us running all the jobs in 1998," Scalara said. "Each knew what the other was doing. As the business grew and we added office staff, I often wondered what might be slipping through the cracks."

To combat that problem, Cutting Edge now uses job-tracking software called Visual EstiTrack from Henning Software Inc. of Hudson, Ohio. Scalara uses the software to help track everything in the small shop—to enter jobs and get status reports when the jobs are done, to prepare shipments and track the time shipments take to get to their locations, and to keep track of information used to bill customers.

A software developer that specializes in parametric applications for AutoCAD users, Synthesis Inc. of Bellingham, Wash., has released an Internet-based CAD automated mass customization software application.

Visiarc AB of Goteborg, Sweden, has released Visiarc Wireless Viewer for accessing and viewing technical design drawings, including CAD drawings, on Nokia's 7650 and 3650 camera-equipped imaging mobile phones.

SensAble Technologies Inc. of Woburn, Mass., is shipping version 6 of FreeForm, the latest release of the developer's touch-based modeling software.

MathWorks Inc. of Natick, Mass., has released Matlab Student Version Release 13. This release includes the latest updates to the company's flagship products, Matlab and Simulink, for the Windows, Linux, and Macintosh operating system X platforms.

A manufacturer of computer graphics software for rendering, simulation, and verification, LightWork Design of Sheffield, England, has spun off its MachineWorks division into a separate and independent company, MachineWorks Ltd.

Blue Ridge Numerics Inc. of Charlottesville, Va., has made its software package Cfdesign—a multipurpose fluid flow and heat transfer simulation program—available as an integrated add-on application for SolidWorks CAD software from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass.

CADCAM-E of Farmington Hills, Mich., has
released an upgrade to its Unigraphics-to-Mastercam translator, CIMMC-UG. The translator is integrated within the Mastercam environment and is useful for Mastercam users who have to work with Unigraphics data but don't have access to Unigraphics software.

A provider of collaboration software, Centric Software Inc. of Paris, has released Innovation Center—a 3-D virtual software application that allows distributed project teams to review ideas, evaluate them, and go over the concepts with the customer and supplier.

Portable coordinate measurement machine manufacturer Faro Technologies Inc. of Lake Mary, Fla., has formed a partnership with HighRes Inc. of La Jolla, Calif., which makes CAD/CAM integrated 3-D digitizing software.

CNC Software Inc. of Tolland, Conn., has released an upgrade to its Mastercam CAM software.

The Cutler-Hammer business unit of diversified industrial
manufacturer Eaton Corp., based in Moon Township, Pa., has partnered with Amtech Power Software of Pittsburgh to release ProDesign, an electrical design and coordination software program for engineers, consultants, and contractors. Cutler-Hammer makes electrical control, power distribution, and industrial automation products.

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