VDO North America, a supplier of electronic information and control systems for original equipment manufacturers, has implemented a software package that predicts how parts made of engineering polymers like nylons and polyesters will warp during manufacture.

VDO North America implemented software from Moldflow to predict how nylon, polyester, and glass-filled parts will warp during manufacture.

The software is used at the company's Cheshire, Conn., plant that designs and manufactures automotive sensors and actuators for Ford, General Motors, and DaimlerChrysler.

"Today, we won't select a gate location until we perform warpage analysis," said Dana Bryan, a manufacturing engineer at the plant. Most of the parts made there are 30 percent glass filled and need to be analyzed as well, he said.

The engineers use Plastics Insight flow, cool, thermoset, fusion, and warp software modules from Moldfow of Wayland, Mass., to troubleshoot design errors. Predicting warp on parts before they're manufactured is critical.
The software also helps to eliminate knit lines and filling problems, Bryan added.

"Our parts must be completely sealed. If engine fluids or water seep in, they can cause damage to the sensors," he said.

Last year, Alumapro of Addison, Ill., a maker of woofers and subwoofers incorporating aluminum cones, sought the help of the audio consulting firm True Technologies of Kenosha, Wis.

Alumapro wanted help on a new 12-inch woofer. It wanted to make its aluminum cone better—although customers weren't returning the woofer at an excessive rate—and to minimize its failure rate, according to Robert True, founder of True Technologies.

"You wouldn't think that aluminum speaker cones could fail," True said. "But sometimes when kids hit it with 2,000 watts of a real hard bass shot, it'll just shatter the cone." Even when users exceeded a woofer's documented ratings, Alumapro replaced the product to satisfy customers. That's why executives sought True Technologies' help in further refining the aluminum cone.

True's goal was to optimize the woofer's moving assembly to minimize the stress on it. For this, True used finite element analysis software and a preprocessor called Cosmos from Structural Research and Analysis Corp. in Los Angeles.

The first step was to create a baseline model, True said. He defined that as modeling the thing that already exists. True built the woofer model in the FEA package so he could change the relevant variables later. To make the model accurate, True determined the standing properties of the product's material. For this, he mainly used his own lab equipment. Once he had the woofer's properties, he fed them into the model, applied the appropriate boundary conditions, and added the right forcing functions. He then validated the model; that is, he checked it to make sure it matched reality.

True then ran a baseline analysis on the woofer to get a picture of the structure's behavior. Using the FEA software to play what-if, he tested some ideas that led to a completely different design. True used the software to vary woofer elements, such as the cone's thickness, profile radius, and mass. He then plotted peak stresses against the variables to find which ones reduced stresses the most. Through the process, he came up with a new design for the cone. The software showed that the new design offered a big benefit to Alumapro. It reduced stresses so much that the redesigned woofer may never fail, according to True.

The company won't go into details about the new design, as it doesn't want to give away trade secrets.

Galvanizing, the process of coating steel to prevent corrosion, has improved its durability and immunity considerably. But National Research Council Canada scientists think that even more can be done.

Sponsored by the International Lead-Zinc Research Organization, researchers at NRC's Industrial Materials Institute are using high-end parallel processing computers, advanced visualization software, and virtual reality systems to find new ways of making industrial galvanizing better and more efficient. The research is being done at the Industrial Materials Institute's new virtual processing laboratory in Boucherville, Quebec. Currently, researchers are working to better understand typical turbulent flow and heat-transfer patterns in industrial galvanizing baths.

Corrosion occurs when the iron in steel combines with oxygen and reverts to one of its many oxide forms. Oxidation speed and the amount of rust vary with the steel's alloy content, its temperature, the presence of moisture, and other environmental factors. The galvanizing process coats the steel to protect it from oxygen, moisture, and corrosive air- and water-borne ions.

Galvanizing baths—typically used for application in the automotive and construction industries—cover steel sheets with a coating of zinc and other metallic and nonmetallic elements.

Aluminum is commonly added to the coating. Then, furnaces known as inductors generate an electromagnetic field, producing enough heat to keep the molten zinc-aluminum bath at coating consistency. Sheets of steel enter the bath and are coated with molten fluid. As the steel cools, the zinc solidifies, forming a protective coating on the metal sheet, said Alain Malo, a research associate in NRC's process modeling and instrumentation section.

But the molten zinc-aluminum alloy doesn't move smoothly and evenly in the galvanizing bath. Each steel sheet enters the bath at 1.75 meters per second with inductor power set at 500 kilowatts. The force of the inductors and the movement of the sheet create complex flow patterns and eddy currents in the melted zinc coating. Researchers use in-house CFD and commercial software to visualize the flow patterns and optimize the galvanizing process, Malo said.

The first step in evaluating the influence of the turbulent flow is to generate the base configuration of the zinc bath. Researchers create a solid model in Pro/Engineer CAD software from PTC of Waltham, Mass., and import it into analysis software from Ansys of Canonsburg, Pa., to create a mesh. Then they use the in-house CFD program, which performs flow pattern simulations. These are visualized in EnSight Gold from Computational Engineering International of Apex, N.C.

With each visualization, the researchers learn how to better predict flow and temperature patterns in industrial continuous galvanizing baths, Malo said.

The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, at 5,223 feet long and spanning the length of 17.5 football fields, is one of the largest concrete structures ever built. From the reservoir floor to its highest parapet, the dam extends more than 550 feet and provides electrical power for much of the Northwest.

When engineers need to make plant repairs, the Grand Coulee power plant has to suspend a portion of its operations, which means lowering power output and losing revenue. To minimize downtime, repairs must be performed quickly and accurately. Alan Lackner, a powerhouse mechanical engineer, designs replacement parts for many of the dam's components, using three-dimensional computer-aided design Inventor software from Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif.

Recently, the plant had to replace a huge 40-year-old coaster gate within a two-week time frame. The dam's coaster gates serve as valves to stop water from entering the penstocks, which are the pipes that feed each individual turbine. The gates are shut during maintenance procedures or as an emergency device to prevent water from flowing to the turbines. The gate that needed replacement measured 20 by 30 feet, was made of solid steel, and weighed about 120 tons.

Engineers estimated it would cost $500,000 to remove the old gate, not accounting for the cost of shutting down one of the Grand Coulee's 24 power generators.

Lackner used the CAD software in order to simulate the motion of the coaster gate's moving parts. Without building a physical model, Lackner was able to design the new gate's parts and determine how they operated together. "Once it went to the machinists, everything went together the first time with no redesigns," he said.

A redesign of the gate's parts after machining would have been costly. The stock material for one part alone—a valve stem—costs almost $3,000 and it would cost about $1,000 in labor expenses for a machinist to make the part. The CAD software helped Lackner work out all potential problems digitally, and helped ensure that the manufacturing and installation of the parts would be done only once.

In the past, engineers would have made several different two-dimensional drawings for each part, calculated and checked clearances manually using multiple drawings, which would have made mistakes more difficult to catch, he said. The CAD package did away with the need for 2-D drawings or a prototype.

Multiphysics software applications can come into play to analyze the miniature components used in microelectromechanical systems. These packages give users the ability to simulate and analyze a combination of more than one of the physical forces acting on a part at one time. The analysis can solve for different forces simultaneously.

Multiphysics analysis software Femlab from Comsol shows magnetic flux lines and potential distribution in a miniature inductor for MEMS applications.

The ability to couple different physical phenomena is crucial in the MEMS field, according to at least one developer of multiphysics software, Comsol Inc. of Burlington, Mass. The company manufactures Femlab software.

In the analyses of miniature components, fluid-structural interactions must often be taken into account, according to the software developer. The interactions can be modeled by connecting displacements of the structure to the acceleration of a fluid, which involve structural and fluid mechanics analyses.

Vacuum Technology Inc. of Oak Ridge, Tenn., designs and manufactures customized helium leak-testing systems, gas analysis systems, and vacuum systems and components for automotive, refrigeration, air conditioning, and consumer product manufacturers. The company wanted to reduce its concept-to-manufacturing cycle time and lower costs because, according to Dwayne Haskell, project manager at VTI, the cost savings could reduce product prices.

The company had been using two-dimensional and three-dimensional software for design and drafting, but determined that 3-D solid modeling computer-aided design capabilities would help to reduce the cycle time, Haskell said.

Vacuum Technology implemented the solid modeling software Inventor, from Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., and kept its existing 2-D package, AutoCAD 2000i, for work such as electrical and plumbing schematics and some simple proposal concept drawings. The new 3-D package is now used, Haskell said, to fully design leak-testing systems, where it has helped reduce the time needed for design modifications—in one instance from two hours to nine minutes.

"The 3-D capability helps us better envision and define our designs before we build than we could ever do in 2-D," he said.

Shell Oil Co. is using virtual reality software originally developed to help explore Mars to assist in the planning of the company's new industrial process plant in Geismar, La.

The Mars Map virtual reality software guided NASA scientists through the 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission by allowing scientists and operations personnel to control remote robotic spacecraft within a virtual environment. The 3-D imaging software was developed at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

"The Mars Pathfinder mission was the first test of this new class of photorealistic virtual reality systems," said Michael Sims of Ames, who managed the Mars Map development team. "Mars Map made a big difference in our understanding of Mars during Pathfinder, and made us realize that this technology could be an extremely powerful tool for the renderers of the world."

Reality Capture Technologies Inc. of San Jose, Calif., was granted a license for further development of the platform. Ted Blackmon, who helped develop the software at NASA, is the company's founder.

The software is being used on the Shell process plant now under construction. The software lets engineers simulate a plant and create operating procedures for it, and train engineers who will be working there. It provides access to construction sites and lets users manage, assess, control, and respond to changes in the plant's construction.

"It's almost like a video game where you hold a joystick and walk around, making sure that everything is working right, only in this case you walk around a not-yet-built Shell plant," Blackmon said.

The software will help Shell build the processing plant more quickly and then continue to maintain the plant, according to Blackmon.

Waterloo Maple Inc. of Waterloo, Ontario, which manufactures mathematical software, has upgraded its Maple software to Maple 8.

Alias|Wavefront of Toronto, a maker of animation software for the graphics and engineering industries, has released version 10 of its StudioTools software. The software is a computer-aided industrial design (CAID) package.

Cimatron Ltd. of Givat Shmuel, Israel, a developer of CAD and computer-aided manufacturing software, has released QuickNC, a numerically controlled program for the tooling industry.

RealityWave Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., a developer of technology that allows the integration of industrial data with a company's enterprise system, has updated ConceptStation, which is Web-based interactive collaborative software for two-dimensional or three-dimensional viewing and markup.

A provider of software for the designing and building industries, GiveMePower Corp. of Calgary, Alberta, has released a VoiceNote audio note-keeping collaboration service.

Ransen Software of Kaysville, Utah, has released Dexterpen, a stand-alone CAD application that the developer says is useful for small and repetitive 2-D tasks. The software creates collections of drawings of slightly different components that users can import into their standard CAD program.

Ansys of Canonsburg, Pa., a maker of computer-aided engineering software that develops mainly simulation programs, has partnered with Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., a maker of CAD software. Ansys will provide simulation software for Autodesk.

Spatial Corp. of Westminster, Colo., a maker of 3-D software components, has released version 8.0 of its 3D ACIS Modeler software application.

Design engineers who need prototypes of parts they're designing are getting rapid prototyping services from Motorola Inc. of Atlanta. The service is being offered by Motorola Product Testing Services, part of Motorola Energy Systems Group.

home | features | news update | marketplace | departments | about ME | back issues | ASME | site search

© 2002 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers