The year 2005 was a very good one for a certain sector of the engineering software market.

Research firm CIMdata Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., reports that the global product lifecycle management market expanded significantly last year.

The PLM market grew 8.7 percent to reach $18.1 billion in 2005, which exceeded the firm's estimates, according to CIMdata research. The firm attributed this growth to the strengthening global economy and to more companies that regard PLM as a method of increasing business performance.

The research firm expects PLM investments to continue climbing over the next five years, reaching an estimated $26.3 billion by 2010.

Tool and die manufacturer Die Tron of Grand Rapids, Mich., saw efficiencies increase by 30 percent after moving from two-dimensional to three-dimensional software and marrying the entire plant—from engineering to shop floor—via integrated software, said David Rose, Die Tron's vice president.

The move was made in three phases. The company started by implementing VISI design software. Approximately a year later, managers installed computer-aided manufacturing software from the same vendor. Phase three began about one and a half years ago—with a wireframe design application.

Engineers at tool and die maker Die Tron sped up their design cycle by 10 percent when they moved to 3-D design software from their 2-D system.

Each software package is part of a package that is called VISI Series from Vero International of Wixom, Mich. It's composed of integrated wireframe, surface, and solid modeling, along with 2-D and 3-D machining applications.

"Using just one 3-D solid file across the board makes it a lot easier to visualize our work," Rose said.

"We're at least 10 percent faster in the design cycle with fewer mistakes. That certainly affects time to market. We don't have file translations going from our CAD department to the CAM department. That's a tremendous time saver," he added.

Want an up-close and personal look at a large molecule? Ask a student at the University of Wales.

A new 6-foot by 7-foot virtual reality wall will help students at the university in Bangor, Wales, to conceptualize molecular and materials models and carry out quantum mechanical research.

The wall went up in the school's Molecular Modeling and Visualization Center. It's from Fakespace Systems Inc. of Marshalltown, Iowa. When students use the wall, they feel surrounded by computerized depictions of problems they're working on, said Maher Kalaji, head of the School of Chemistry at the university.

"The large-scale screen and 3-D capability facilitate a huge leap in the way that we visualize and understand molecular structures and interactions," he said.

The wall, officially called the PowerWall, is a flat 3-D display. A slightly different image for the right and left eye creates a stereoscopic effect, mimicking the way humans see. As viewers look at the display from different angles, their perspective changes accordingly, which also mimics human vision.

Crash! It's all over in the blink of an eye: Sensors register the impact, the airbag ignites and inflates. All in 150 milliseconds, at most.

What happens in this short span of time—at least the visible part—has been thoroughly documented by crash testers. However, the first 10 to 20 milliseconds when the airbag is ignited and begins to unfold are essentially hidden from view.
Only isolated photos of this phase existed, at one image per airbag ignition, said Philip Helberg of the Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed Dynamics, part of the Ernst-Mach-Institute in Efringen-Kirchen, Germany.

Those single photos presented a problem.

"One cannot draw conclusions about the overall process from just a single image," Helberg said.

For that reason, he and his colleagues have developed a procedure that makes the entire airbag ignition process visible. Using a technique called X-ray cinematography, they can illuminate the entire ignition sequence in eight frames.

For engineers who are studying airbags, these eight pictures are extremely helpful.

With the help of these exposures, airbag manufacturers now can determine the best way to stow airbags in their housing so that they unfold in the optimum manner, Helberg said.

The sequence begins about five milliseconds after the airbag is activated, and finishes eight images and eight milliseconds later.

In order to record the image sequences, Helberg uses a sophisticated shooting technique: X-ray flashes irradiate the airbag from one side while the unabsorbed radiation strikes a
fluorescent film on the opposite side, illuminating it for 1.6 microseconds, a period of time imperceptible to the naked eye.

Charge-coupled devices behind the film record these images.

Antennas sprout on military vehicles like a closely planted field of metal flowers.

Military aircraft, vehicles, ships, and submarines sport a complex array of antennas needed to tap into the broad range of communications and radar frequencies. But they're not very attractive. And they take up valuable space and add weight and complexity to military systems.

To lighten the load, researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Atlanta recently presented an ultra-wideband design that could replace as many as five conventional antennas with one single, flat antenna.

Their wideband design relies on a backplane structure and takes advantage of the electronic coupling that takes place between the elements of an antenna array. But designers had long been taught to avoid that coupling.

"Instead of trying to avoid mutual coupling, we designed it into the antenna where it actually provides a lot of benefits, including allowing us to have an extremely wide bandwidth," said Jim Maloney, a principal research engineer on the project. "What everybody used to avoid was actually the silver bullet that makes this work."

By modeling various antenna layouts in Georgia Tech's homegrown computer modeling software, researchers were able to determine how to take advantage of that coupling. They could evaluate design performance without actually building the devices. Modeling also helped them develop the broadband screen backplane, a multilayer structure composed of foams and partly conductive films that prevents reflected signals from degrading performance, Maloney said.

Researchers are already checking out potential commercial applications for their antenna-saving design, including aesthetically pleasing flat antennas that could sprout from buildings and wearable antennas that could be woven into soldiers' jackets.

Researchers at Iowa State University in Ames are touting their soon-to-be-completed upgrade to the school's C6 virtual reality room. They say its extremely high resolution could aid medical and military research.

When it's completed late this summer, the installation will boast a resolution of 100 million pixels. It's expected to cost $4 million.

The six-sided virtual reality room at Iowa State University is getting a facelift, with upgraded computer hardware and software. This is how the room looks from the outside.

The six-year-old structure is a 10-foot-square room that displays back-projections of three-dimensional computer-generated scenes on walls, floor, and ceiling. Its displays will deliver 16 times more pixels than it had before. A Hewlett-Packard computer with 96 parallel graphics processing units feeding 24 Sony digital projectors will generate the images.

Iowa State researchers will use the virtual reality room to develop realistic battlefield scenes that could improve remote control of unmanned aerial vehicles. The system will provide a bird's-eye view of terrain and other aircraft as live data is fed from sensors, said James Oliver, the director of Iowa State's Virtual Reality Applications Center and a professor of mechanical engineering.

Researchers who will share the C6 room include mechanical engineers and architects.

Mark Bryden, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, has used virtual reality to develop engineering tools that help engineers make better decisions. He said the C6 upgrade will make for more realistic images that can transmit more information.

Other engineers are working with biologists to create visualization databases for as many as 22,000 genes, enabling researchers to simulate and observe photosynthesis and cell metabolism.

Thirty may be the new 20, but when it comes to military aircraft, 30 is often retirement age. But how do officials know when one of those airplanes is ready to be put out to pasture?

Because many Navy aircraft are pushing 30 years old or more, military officials want a precise system to assess when those aircraft are ready to retire. To answer the call, a Carnegie Mellon University professor developed a new computational method that may help track the lifespan of U.S. Navy aircraft.

Anthony Rollett's system maps in 3-D the microstructure of aircraft materials in their present state. Once the digital map is in the computer, researchers can test materials and analyze the results.

By looking at the data, military officials can determine whether an aircraft is fine, is ready for an overhaul, or should be retired. Rollett is a professor in the materials science and engineering department at the Pittsburgh school.

"We are looking for any kind of defect in critical airplane parts," Rollett said. "For example, moisture combined with dirt or salt creates perfect conditions for the corrosion of airplane parts."

Researchers could use the method to predict, for example, how moisture combined with dirt would affect a particular material over a specified length of time. If results don't look good, the part or the entire airplane could be retired, Rollett said.

Swaying gently in your car's seat may be safer than staying firmly seated.

In a head-on collision, automobile passengers seated on a newly designed gliding seat would be much safer than their more traditionally seated counterparts, according to the new seat's designers. Several car companies and seat manufacturers recently tested the Counter-Balanced Motion seat, which operates on the same principle as a porch glider—pendular motion.

For the tests, dummies wired with sensors were placed in the seat and driven into a solid wall at 35 mph. The test results, affirmed by specialized auto crash simulation software, showed that the seat could reduce head injuries by 30 percent and leg injuries by 70 percent, said Tom Greer, who owns Gizmo Design of Sebastopol, Calif., one of the companies that helped design the product.

American Ergonomics of San Rafael, Calif., and Gizmo Design developed the seat in tandem.

Head-on collisions generally involve two impacts—one when the driver's body slams forward and a second, rear whiplash when the head and neck recoil. The Counter-Balanced Motion seat mitigates the first impact in a collision because it arcs forward a few inches on an upturned rail, tipping the body away from the impact and moving the legs safely up and away from the floor, Greer said. The lower back also stays in contact with the backrest and the face travels more slowly toward impact with the airbag to lessen those types of injuries, he said.

The seat absorbs the subsequent recoil by sliding back into its original position, he added.

Designers used computer-aided design technology from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass., for design. For analysis, they used CosmosWorks, also from SolidWorks.

If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? We might soon find out, thanks to a European project through which millions of software-based agents would evolve their own world around them.

Five European research institutes are collaborating on the New Ties project, a software-based society populated by software beings capable of developing their own language and culture.

Ultimately, the New Ties project hopes to see the evolution of an entirely new culture, with its own language and rituals.
This kind of social interaction is a tantalizing prospect for the artificial intelligence experts, computer scientists, sociologists, and linguists all working on New Ties.

"While individual (or machine) learning and evolutionary behavior have been quite well studied, social learning is still an unknown quantity," said project coordinator Gusz Eiben, an artificial intelligence professor at Vrije University in Amsterdam, who is at work on the project.

"For the linguists and sociologists, the main motivation is to study existing processes in societies and languages," Eiben said. "The computer scientists, on the other hand, want to develop and study machine collaboration, with an eye on future applications in robotics.

"Robots in the home are only five to 10 years away, and in the future we might be able to send robot rescue teams to disaster areas to search for survivors," Eiben added. "They could even one day travel to Mars. Obviously, it will be important for them to be able to cooperate with each other—especially if they're in a hostile environment."

Within the next few months, the team will create an artificial environment and create 1,000 agents to live within it. New Ties will run across 60 gridded computers to support a project of that size.

Each agent will have unique characteristics, including gender, life expectancy, fertility, size, and metabolism. Their traits will be inherited from their parents, and passed on to their offspring, but they will be able to learn from their own experiences and from each other. They'll communicate in a simple language using basic words, such as "food" or "cold." Researchers expect language to evolve with society.

"We're not programming how they behave. Each entity has its own controller, analogous to a brain," Eiben said. "And because we want to create an interesting controller, we have to produce a challenging world—otherwise there would be no impetus for development. So, in one scenario, we have created a world with seasons, so that the agents have to learn to find, transport, and store food. And there are two rival groups, so they will have to learn to tell friend from foe."

Joining Vrije University are the University of Surrey in Guildford, England; Budapest's Eötvös Loránd University; Edinburgh's Napier University, and Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

The experiment ends in August 2007. And, yes, other academics and many Internet bloggers have made an analogy to one of science fiction's favorite scenarios. They've expressed dismay at a computerized world that could evolve to wrest itself from human control.

Softcover International of Cambridge, England, is now shipping Scan2CAD version 7.5, which automatically converts scanned paper drawings into AutoCAD data exchange files for editing in any CAD program.

CAD Schroer GmbH of Moers, Germany, has made available version 2.1 of its Stheno/Pro1 drafting plug-in for Pro/Engineer software.

ARTVPS of Palm Bay, Fla., which makes rendering software, has launched the latest version of RenderPipe, a ray-tracing application.

Dell of Round Rock, Texas, has released two new mobile workstations—the Precision M90 and the Precision M6.

A maker of computer-aided manufacturing software for programming computer numerically controlled machine tools and controls, Gibbs and Associates of Moorpark, Calif., said its software GibbsCAM has been certified for Autodesk Inventor 11 under the Autodesk Inventor Certified Applications Program.

Pointwise of Fort Worth, Texas, has made available its CFD meshing software, Gridgen version 15.09, on the Silicon Graphics Prism Deskside workstation.

Product lifecycle management software maker UGS Corp. of Plano, Texas, says that it's producing its NX 4 digital product development software for the Linux open source operating system.

Boothroyd Dewhurst Inc. of Wakefield, R.I., has
released Design for Manufacture and Assembly 2006, a new version of the company's software intended to simplify manufacture and assembly.

Simpleware Ltd. of Exeter, England, which makes image-based meshing software, has released version 2.1 of its software application, ScanIP.

A provider of online catalog and configuration figures for products, TechniCon of Emeryville, Calif., has released version 5.0 of CustomCommerce, its platform for delivering product data on the Web.

VX Corp. of Palm Bay, Fla., provider of CAD and CAM software, has released Ready-Sketch, a parametric sketcher library of predefined, fully dimensioned, and constrained sketches that can be inserted into VX CAD/CAM.

iKnowledge Solutions Inc., formerly Capdo, of Denver, has released i.get.it Desktop, a software application that provides those with limited access to the Internet with a means to record learning paths, assessments, progress reports, bookmarks, and personal notes.

Surfware Inc. of Westlake Village, Calif., has released Surfcam Velocity II for high-speed milling.

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