"The key to keeping our machines affordable is speeding up the design process," Higgins said. "Engineering typically represents 30 percent of the cost of the job. Design time is also probably the biggest factor in making or missing a delivery schedule.

"The process of turning a layout into detailed drawings would often take two or three times the amount of hours initially estimated," he added. "That's because any design corrections necessitated changing every drawing individually."

Matrix Automation had been using a two-dimensional software design package from AutoCad of San Rafael, Calif.

The company then implemented SolidWorks mechanical design software from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass.

"In the 2-D package, it was very time-consuming to cut and trim lines," Higgins said. "A fast designer could probably draw an isometric view of a part in about four hours."

With the new software, it takes designers less than a minute to generate multiple views of a part, he added.

Moving to the solid modeling software has improved the company's production costs and on-time delivery by eliminating mistakes that are difficult to detect in 2-D drawings. Higgins said engineers formerly spent days visually checking 2-D drawings for interference or colliding parts and would still miss problems, leading to costly delays.

Higgins compared the 3-D software to the spell checker commonly available for word processing programs.

"The whole process of finding flaws in the design now takes a matter of seconds," he said.

Christensen also was able to spot part interferences that he might have missed on drawings, he said.

"My time savings were substantial, but they're insignificant compared to what I saved the client by delivering a design free of interferences," Christensen said.

Summit Tool Design used the Solid Edge solid modeling program from Unigraphics Solutions to design a stamping die for sheet metal auto parts.

In the production of sheet metal, one die—known as a progressive die—can perform 10 or more operations on multiple parts at a time, including cutting, bending, and piercing. Also, companies are trying to increase productivity by eliminating secondary operations and incorporating them into the primary progressive die. These developments pose challenges to stamping die designers, who must squeeze many components into a limited working envelope while dealing with the complex shape of the finished part, Christensen said.

It was for these reasons that Christensen moved from 2-D computer-aided design to a solid modeling program. For the solid modeling program, he used Solid Edge from Unigraphics Solutions of St. Louis.

Solid Edge is a Windows-based program that Christensen chose over a Unix CAD program, in part because when he hires temporary help, it's possible to find someone who can operate Solid Edge.

The software, called Enovia, will be used to manage and organize product data and documents generated by particular projects. The software also will link the engineering and manufacturing technologies used by the shipbuilding company.

The software will track more than four million parts: two million designs, drawings, and revisions; and another two million bill of materials. Newport News Shipbuilding designs and constructs nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines for the U.S. Navy.

The manufacturer worked with the Florida Manufacturing Technology Center, an affiliate of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. The center helped Atkins put in place what are called lean manufacturing techniques and technologies to improve the company's order-fulfillment process. Originating in Japan in the 1970s, lean manufacturing eliminates manufacturing activities or actions that add no real value to the product or the service, according to NIST.

After implementing lean techniques, Atkins' time for production of 500 units dropped from 40 hours to 11.

The CAD Standard was developed and published by the National Institute of Building Sciences in Washington. The goal of the standard is to streamline and simplify the exchange of building design and construction data during project development and the life of the building.

Adoption of the National CAD Standard by those in the building design and construction industry is voluntary. The U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps., the state of Utah, and the National Institutes of Health have adopted the standard.

The system, called AutoTAS, was installed in October 1999 and, since then, the company has also seen savings in the form of increased setup efficiency and improved tool inventory control, Richardson added. The system tracks tool inventory and establishes bin minimums and maximums on inventory. Before installing the system, the company employed a tool-crib attendant, but tool management practices at the company didn't allow it to make the most of that employee, Richardson said.

"The old crib was a mess," he said. "We had no inventory control. There was a panicked rushing to gather tools together and frequent red-label overnight shipping. There was too much downtime on machining centers and workstations, because the tools weren't on hand and we were waiting for the mail to bring them."

The tool-inventory system is from Sandvik of Sandviken, Sweden, and was available to Richardson Manufacturing in the United States through Micro Estimating Systems of New Berlin, Wis.

Another benefit that accrues to the system is reduced machine downtime, Richardson added.

"When machines are down, you're paying your operator, plus you're hurting your schedule," he said. "You've always got the same burden rate on your machine, so when it's down for six hours waiting for United Parcel Service to come, that's very costly."

The ASDL is a method of archiving digital information by merging many libraries with different digital data types into one large system accessible by all users. This allows all necessary data to be warehoused in a common repository. A user then can execute a single query to locate data within the warehouse. The ILS hardware and software handles large amounts of digital imagery and other large files.

The National Air Intelligence Center and Lockheed Martin will jointly demonstrate and evaluate the ASDL concept with the intention of showing that an ASDL can be cost effective and viable in a large-scale commercial system. The ILS includes technologies that enable hierarchical digital storage and database management.

The SLS catheter is a hollow tube containing a ring of optic fibers and a radio-opaque tip at the end that allows the doctor to visualize the device's position in the body by means of fluoroscopy. This allows doctors to remove lead wires running from a pacemaker to the patient's heart when it is necessary.

Physicians thread the catheter over the wire they want to remove until it hits resistant scar tissue. Then, the doctor fires the laser and dissolves the scar tissue and continues doing so, down the length of the scar tissue and the wire, until the wire comes free.

Spectranetics used a CAD system from Cadkey of Marlborough, Mass., when designing the products.

"Catheter design is esoteric," said Paul Hollendorfer, laser systems engineer at Spectranetics. "The components seem straightforward—plastic tubes, bundles of fiber optics, and some form of radio-opaque tip. But they vary widely in design, depending upon use."

The company designs physical prototypes by hand, then engineers create assembly drawings in the CAD program and also use the CAD system to document each piece of the design.

In addition, the molders that create prototypes for Oneac have slashed the time it takes to make a prototype from 12 to 16 weeks to just one month. The quick turnaround time came about because the solid model file is free of dimension errors that were frequently part of the 2-D files, said Murray Delamoreaux, mechanical and industrial design manager at Oneac.

In one case, Delamoreaux said, he e-mailed a design to his prototyping company and had a prototype in hand the next day.

Oneac uses the SolidDesigner solid modeling software from CoCreate of Fort Collins, Colo.

The theater, named C6, will let researchers walk into buildings that don't exist, to get a close-up view of severe weather phenomena like tornadoes, and to inspect the interior of operating industrial furnaces to make them more efficient. The theater projects images on all six of its sides—the walls, ceiling, and floor. The tether lines, gloves, and headsets—common in many virtual reality rooms—have been replaced by wireless systems. Additionally, computers and graphics provide bright and realistic images that respond to human interaction, according to Carolina Cruz-Neira, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at ISU and associate director for the virtual reality applications center.

"C6 will open new venues for research on the applications of virtual reality to science and engineering challenges," Cruz-Neira said.

The testing and simulation mix allows original equipment manufacturers, automotive customers, and suppliers to do real-world testing of parts combined with computer analysis of the entire mechanical system in which the part will fit. The already known behavior of the part can be used to calibrate the computer analysis, which eliminates unnecessary simulation, according to the developer.

In the design of a new vehicle suspension, for example, test data from standard suspension parts—such as bushings and springs—can be combined with CAD models of new structural components in order to represent the entire finished assembly. LMS calls this a hybrid approach to design and simulation.

ANSYS of Canonsburg, Pa., has formed a strategic alliance with SGI of Mountain View, Calif., to supply the ANSYS computer-aided design software on the SGI Linux operating system.

Users of Auto-desk Inventor now have access to Algor of Pittsburgh's InCAD products. Inventor is produced by Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif.

Unigraphics Solutions of St. Louis has released ProductVision version 3, which is a new release of the company's visualization software.

Fluent of Lebanon, N.H., a pro-vider of computational fluid dynamics software, has licensed the parasolid kernel modeler from Unigraphics Solutions for inclusion in Fluent's Gambit line of products.

ESI Group of Troy, Mich., a maker of virtual prototyping software, has released Pam-Form 2000, 3-D software for forming simulation of composite and plastic parts.

Henning Industrial Software of Hudson, Ohio, has released upgrades to its Visual EstiTrack manufacturing software and Visual Books accounting software.

International TechneGroup Inc. of Milford, Ohio, has released CAD/IQ version 3.0, a CAD model quality testing tool.

Mechanical Dynamics of Ann Arbor, Mich., has released Dynamic Designer/Motion 2000 for SolidWorks mechanical design simulation software. The Mechanical Dynamics software gives 3-D simulation capabilities to the mechanical design software.

Tecnomatix Technologies of Herzliya, Israel, has announced an agreement with SAP of Walldorf, Germany, to interface Tecnomatix Empower digital manufacturing software with SAP product life-cycle management software.

An electronic document storage program, Virtual Paperless, is available from Simple Software of Mogadore, Ohio.

Spatial of Boulder, Colo., will commercialize proprietary Web-based software from Freightliner of Portland, Ore., for management and routing of design data. Freightliner is a heavy-duty truck manufacturer.

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