In Mechanical Engineering, there are many examples of products in motion: car suspensions in the automotive industry, lifting platforms in industrial equipment and excavators in heavy machinery. Designers are challenged to find the best design to successfully answer not only the movement need, but also the performance and quality criteria, and all in a shorter and shorter product development timeframe. Products in motion are increasing in complexity, and performance targets are becoming more demanding in a competitive market. They need to be lighter, stronger and often cheaper in the consumer products industry. They must be cost effective with higher quality in the aerospace and automotive industries, and often with the commonality to be released faster on the market with key innovative differentiations.
How do we understand the impact of a design choice on the prescribed distance between components through operational movements? How do we assess velocity and acceleration of an excavator’s bucket while ensuring its structural strength? How do we avoid clashes and failure when designing a brand new conveyor?
CATIA answers these questions by enabling the rapid development of high-quality mechanical products with Mechanism Simulation Designer solution. Designers equipped with this 3DEXPERIENCE solution can create any type of 3D assembly in motion and for a wide range of engineering processes.
They can then design the product in motion with valuable kinematics insights in the collaborative 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Creating complex mechanical systems from elementary mechanisms empowers any designer to understand and review sophisticated mechanisms early in the design cycle. Kinematic data such as distance, speed and acceleration measures, clash analysis, geometric traces and swept volumes are calculated during the simulation, and displayed in graphs or in the 3D. The kinematic simulation can then be updated automatically to efficiently evaluate more design alternatives.
Testing the kinematics of an assembly in motion is the first step towards an improved product development process but what about the structural strength of the critical components? What if one of the parts of the scissor lift does not sustain the load during the vertical motion? What if a link of the front-end suspension of a new snowmobile is under dimensioned and fails during the operation? What if the stresses induced in the control arms of a car suspension are too high?
Today, because of the growing complexity of mechanical products and increasingly fierce competition to bring new designs to market faster, designers feel mounting pressure to better assess product performance as early as possible. Using Stress Analysis to answer to these challenges enables them to make better design decisions thanks to accurate information about product behavior and performance.
This is why Mechanism Simulation Designer solution is being enriched from R2017x FD01 with Structural analysis capabilities with Static Study Application.
While testing the assembly in motion, the design can be checked from a structural point of view with linear static simulation to easily guide design modifications and then can perform stress and displacement simulation on the critical part of the scissor lift reducing the need of costly physical prototyping. While designing the control arms of a car suspension, it can locate the highest stress areas for an accurate dimensioning.
From R2017x FD01, Static Study application offers an intuitive guided workflow for linear static analysis so users can perform part and assembly simulation for design pre-dimensioning. The intuitive linear contact definitions with automatic contact detection as well as the powerful Abaqus solver provide accurate answer coupled with automated modeling for a fast and easy adoption.
The addition of Static Study Application in Mechanism Simulation Designer answers the growing need of simulation driven design. The designer community can now validate their product in motion early in the product development process, avoiding oversizing because of unknown strength, and limiting expensive physical prototypes in order to release a better and more innovative design the first time.
Learn more about Mechanism Simulation Designer, here. Learn more about Design Simulation, here.
