Instead, they announced that they would upgrade their product knowledge management software, the technology used to manage information and documents related to the product development process, and would be using software from Structural Dynamics Research Corp. of Milford, Ohio. SDRC had purchased Otis' former software provider, Sherpa Systems of Milpitas, Calif.

Otis is a manufacturer and installer of elevators, escalators, and moving walkway systems. The company will use the SDRC software to store and sort documents, designs, and engineering changes. Otis will also use it to access and share CAD data.

In response, the company completely reorganized its approach to product design and development, creating a new design and development process that allowed it to improve factory throughput.

The company designs, develops, and manufactures mass spectrometers for the scientific and medical industries. Mass spectrometers identify the chemical substances present in samples of organic and inorganic material, and are used by many different types of researchers and scientists, including those in the biotechnology, biomedical, and pharmaceutical fields.

Design software from Boothroyd Dewhurst and a change in design philosophy helped MDS Sciex cut time to market for its mass spectrometers.

To implement the new approach to product design, MDS Sciex used Design for Manufacture and Assembly design analysis software from Boothroyd Dewhurst of Wakefield, R.I. The software gave engineering teams early insight into the manufacturing and assembly costs associated with product design and provided a structured way of analyzing designs so engineers could create products that are manufacturable and easy to assemble. The company implemented the software in the early 1990s. The software helped to reduce design complexity, but executives thought it could do more.

And it has. When used recently to help develop the company's API 3 mass spectrometer, it helped cut the design cycle from three years to two and lowered material costs by 77 percent. It also reduced change orders, according to George Valaitis, manager of mechanical engineering at MDS Sciex.

Atlantis Components, a custom dental products company in Cambridge, Mass., has provided about 1,000 dentists around the country with implants that look as natural as real teeth in less time and at lower cost than the implants made traditionally. A key part of Atlantis' implant creation process relies on digital duplication technology tied to a computer-aided design system.

Julian Osorio, a Boston prosthodontist who founded Atlantis Components in 1996, is the creator of a process that makes implants available to mainstream dentistry. For the process, Osorio uses a digital duplication technology that makes it possible to take output from 3-D scanners and then digitally duplicate the shape, textures, and color of real teeth. The duplication technology is called Geomagic Studio from Raindrop Geomagic of Morrisville, N.C. Models created with the technology can be output directly into CAD software or to computer-numerically controlled manufacturing systems. Or, they can be automatically transformed to highly detailed but very small models that can be displayed on the web.

The cast allows Atlantis employees to make sure their implants will fit the patient's mouth perfectly. They can test for fit within the digitally duplicated mouth, before creating the implant.

"It can be very time-consuming to fit an abutment," said Tom Cole, Atlantis president. "For one thing, the mouth is a difficult place to work. And, depending on where the tooth was extracted or lost, there can be difficulties with the quality of bone in which to place the fixture."

The abutment is the part of the dental implant that screws into the fixture and holds the crown in place. Perhaps the most difficult stage of fitting an implant is fitting the abutment.

The digital-fitting process begins when an Atlantis employee scans a cast of the patient's mouth provided by the patient's dentist. The digital duplication system is then used to create surfaces from the scanned point cloud data to come up with a correct model of the mouth. The surfaces are imported into an applicable CAD software package.

The abutment and implant are then modeled in the CAD package and produced.

"Surfacing the dental anatomy in Geomagic Studio allows us to modify CAD models in context, thus accurately producing an abutment that fits into the patient's mouth with no further adjustments," said Bethany Grant, Atlantis senior development engineer.

Joseph Gian-Grasso, a Philadelphia dentist, has used the Atlantis abutment on about 50 patients over the last year. The process beats the early days of dentistry, Gian-Grasso added, when abutments were a one-size-fits-all affair.

The authority oversees the operation of numerous local government facilities, including three local airports, four administrative buildings, and three toll plazas. The maintenance manager software, from Eagle Technology of Mequon, Wis., takes over preventive and demanded maintenance scheduling from an outdated computerized maintenance management system, said Pat Jennings, the maintenance supervisor.

The software has led to a reduction in unexpected downtime caused by machine failure, Jennings said.

The team developed the approach using Pam-Shock software from ESI Group, which is simulation software for predictive virtual testing of industrial processes.

"Tires are probably the most complex component of a vehicle," said Moustafa El-Gindy, a Penn State researcher involved in the project. "Tire performance, especially at high speeds, is critical from the point of view of vehicle safety."

Every tire has a maximum speed limit at which what is called a standing wave occurs along the tire circumference. This causes tire deformation, a rise in temperature, and eventual tire failure, El-Gindy said. The speed at which the standing wave forms, and resultant tire failure occurs, is usually found by using a tire-testing machine. It rotates the tire in contact with a drum to measure durability and endurance.

But with the Penn State and ESI Group method, engineers can produce a computer simulation of any tire type at any tire inflation pressure and predict the formation of the standing wave, El-Gindy said.

The Penn State researchers used the simulation—which can be run on a personal computer—to investigate the effects of different tire inflation pressures on the formation of the standing wave, of the energy consumed by the tire, of the forces acting on the tire spindle, and of the pressure at the patch where the tire meets the road.

Airbus will purchase 2,500 seats of Catia from Dassault Systemes of Suresnes, France. The CAD software is coupled with Enovia collaborative software from Dassault and IBM of Armonk, N.Y.

Airbus engineers will use the software to digitally create the A3XX completely before manufacture. The collaborative software will allow Airbus engineers to communicate with development partners throughout the world via the Internet, said Martin Jetter, general manager for IBM product lifecycle management.

With the Airbus standardization on Catia and Enovia, the worldwide commercial aerospace industry now has a common product development platform, he added. If they so choose, Airbus parts suppliers could adopt Catia and Enovia software to minimize data translation issues and to collaborate on product development via the Internet, Jetter said.

The customer's new specifications required a completely new design with a customized set of three-dimensional models and two-dimensional drawings for the multiple suppliers that would have to create new injection molds and stamping tools. The tools, in turn, would be used to create the wiper blades.

Pylon's customer had specified new winter blades—including a boot around the blade to prevent ice buildup for the more aerodynamic windshields of the new, larger vehicles, said Carlos Romero, the lead mechanical engineer at Pylon. The customer needed these blades in time to put them on vehicles being produced for the upcoming winter season.

The engineering team finished the design phase in two-and-a-half weeks, said Romero. The company uses Solid Edge, a computer-aided design software from Unigraphics Solutions of St. Louis.

Because Pylon relies on many outside suppliers that provide blade parts, and because these suppliers mainly use 2-D CAD systems, the Pylon engineers appreciated the ability to send CAD files back and forth via the Internet. Many of the suppliers' CAD systems could be translated to Solid Edge, Romero said.

Alliant Energy was created in April 1998 by a merger of IES Industries of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Interstate Power of Dubuque, Iowa; and WPL Holdings of Madison, Wis. In January, the company began using the load analysis software, from Lodestar of Pea-body, Mass., to perform load studies across those three companies.

The load analysis team faced a series of challenges in trying to analyze customer behavior across the companies because each utility had employed a different analysis method, said Terry Baxter, Alliant Energy's team leader for forecasting. Load data also comes in from the three metering systems. And the utilities continue to use three different customer information systems.

The software enables Alliant to combine information from various data streams. That lets the forecasting team hone the accuracy of the load research samples that create the typical load profile for each customer class. Data from across all three utilities is combined before calculating the profiles, Baxter said.

"As far as the standard load rate research analysis, we had three companies to analyze and three separate ways to analyze them," Baxter said. "One of the goals of purchasing the software was to consolidate all that analysis in one package and consolidate all the data."

The software developer will work with ARA to develop data translators for NASA's NextGrade graphical user interface. The GUI, developed by ARA for NASA, allows rapid modeling, assembly, and analysis of intelligent component models for system simulation. The simulation will be used for NASA's Intelligent Synthesis Environment Initiative, aimed at upgrading and creating new software for NASA science and engineering use.

Briefly Noted

Quantum Composites of Midland, Mich., has released a software program called Comparem, which the company calls a time-saving program to be used in the development of new composite applications.

Cimatron of Livonia, Mich., a maker of CAD/CAM software for the tooling industry, has released Cimatron version 11, which provides additional functions for modeling, machining, drafting, and data interfaces.

The maker of engineering simulation software, MSC.Software, of Costa Mesa, Calif., has announced the release of MSC.visualNastran Desktop 2001, which is integrated with SolidWorks software.

Cohere Networks of Englewood, Colo., a provider of network-based data and multimedia asset management software, has announced the formation of a division for the discrete manufacturing and engineering industries.

Spatial's PlanetCAD division of Boulder, Colo., and Tecnomatix Technologies of San Jose, Calif., a maker of manufacturing software, have announced a Web-based manufacturing costing service called quote-a-part that is expected to be available soon for beta testing.

Nord Electronic Drive Selection software has been released by Nord Gear of Waunakee, Wis., a maker of mechanical and electrical drive systems.

Rockwell Automation of Milwaukee, a manufacturer of factory automation software and hardware, has introduced a powertrain maintenance program.

To provide engineering project and design services to the automotive industry, Ansoft of Pittsburgh, a maker of electronic design architecture software for engineers, has formed a new business venture, Automotive Product and Technology Solutions.

Web4, a subsidiary of netGuru in Yorba Linda, Calif., a provider of Internet technology, has made Web-enabled engineering software available on a rental basis via the company's Web site, Web4engineers.com.

To simulate flow, heat transfer, and chemical reaction in polymers and materials with similar properties, Fluent of Lebanon, N.H., a provider of computational fluid dynamics software, has released Polyflow 3.8.

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