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An Agent of Change: Unigraphics NX WAVE in Design Modeling Design Creation and Validation
February 2004
About CPDA Collaborative Product Development Associates, LLC (CPD Associates; CPDA) is a new company formed by the PLM research team of D.H. Brown Associates, Inc. (DHBA). CPDA will now support and fulfill the PLM research services of D.H. Brown Associates. DHBA, which has been acquired by Ideas International, will continue to service and support its ITR research service programs.
Program Description Design Creation and Validation examines advanced CAD/CAM, CAE, and CAx tools and strategies. Working with several of the world’s largest manufacturers, CPDA’s Design Creation and Validation analysts track the cutting edge of design, engineering automation, and integration. Research examines critical issues such as Knowledge-Based Engineering, Web-Based Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Visualization, and Design Technology Management.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS BUSINESS BENEFITS.........................................................................................................................................2 GENERAL ELECTRIC AIRCRAFT ENGINES...............................................................................................................2 FIGURE 1: GE Aircraft Engine Unigraphics WAVE Model............................................................................3 KOENIG & BAUER AG ..........................................................................................................................................3 FIGURE 2: Koenig & Bauer’s Commander Web Press Used for Printing Newspapers and Other Large Tasks................................................................................................3 A U.S. COMPRESSOR MANUFACTURER ................................................................................................................4 PRODUCT CONTROL .........................................................................................................................................4 FIGURE 3: Unigraphics NX WAVE Control Structure ..................................................................................5 SYSTEMS ENGINEERING THROUGH WAVE ...................................................................................................5 WAVE AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE...................................................................................................................6
An Agent of Change: Unigraphics NX WAVE in Design Modeling Ken Versprille, Research Director
Product expertise and design know-how drive competitive advantage. Intense pressure to enhance productivity in product development forces an ongoing quest for process change that will foster innovation while at the same time reduce cost, shorten delivery cycles, and improve quality. In many product engineering environments, however, companies lack the ability to tangibly “get their arms around” a repeatable product design methodology that allows them to embed and control improvements. Even though an organization designs the next generation of the same or similar product repetitively, individual design engineers often fail to model in a consistent manner. That lack of consistency hinders efforts to codify company-proprietary knowledge and industry best practices into the process. Unigraphics NX WAVE technology from UGS PLM Solutions offers product design organizations a single-source, structured control mechanism for top-down design, even in light of upwardly spiraling product complexity, customization, and product variants. Consistency is an overriding concern in dealing with repeated product design projects, multiple product configurations, and the frequent design changes that occur throughout the entire design and manufacturing process. Users testify to an overriding need for consistency in dealing with rapid in-process product model creation and the frequent modifications that occur throughout the entire design and manufacturing process. In all industries, product design is undergoing massive change, flowing from disparate teams of designers, engineers, and analysts, but also from downstream manufacturing process planning that is being done parallel to the product design. Consistency is a critical element in global manufacturing – an increasingly common feature in larger corporations. The mechanism to overcome such issues is a product information architecture that provides a structured and well-defined authoring and reconciliation path. WAVE allows an engineering organization to capture the layout and modular decomposition into subsystems for a given class of product. For example, an automotive manufacturer can capture their design of transmissions within a single, re-executable control structure – regulating each execution through the WAVE control structure to produce a given variant of the design. An airplane manufacturer can capture the design of airfoils in one WAVE control structure and the design of landing gear in a second one. Each can encapsulate both the
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An Agent of Change: Unigraphics NX WAVE in Design Modeling Design Creation and Validation, February 2004
product’s parametric design criteria and its interface interactions between subsystems; a WAVE control structure can act as a mechanical schematic and define the product’s design logic for its 3D physical component models and its hierarchical product assemblies. The use of WAVE then acts as an agent of change, within which a workgroup or larger organization can focus their efforts for process improvement.
BUSINESS BENEFITS Independent discussions with companies in aerospace, automotive, and complex machinery, which deploy Unigraphics NX WAVE in their product development processes, reveal tangible business benefits from its use: improved workgroup communication, reduced cycle time, and streamlined creation of product variants. These improvements combine to improve customer responsiveness and company profitability.
GENERAL ELECTRIC AIRCRAFT ENGINES U.S. aerospace manufacturer General Electric Aircraft Engines (GEAE) reports that its use of WAVE in top-down product design significantly improves communication between workgroups. The company establishes a master model of the product design, and for different functional specialists who typically want to view the product model in different ways, WAVE technology is used to associate and link each context model that captures the different functional perspectives to the master model. All views are updated in synch with the master model. GEAE reports a major impact on workgroup communication leading to cycle-time reduction. Intelligence is incorporated into the master model through the use of rule-based parametric models in the design of every part. The underlying engineering rules are captured to propagate design changes into the master model, accurately scaling the appropriate parameters. In its previous approach, potential design problems were found only after a considerable amount of time, because component models were done in isolation and did not incorporate information on how they impacted other models in the total system. The manager of the Master Model Group at GE Aircraft Engines notes that before the use of WAVE, the models did not “talk” to each other and it took a manual process to resolve issues, with human error creeping in because a design intent could be misinterpreted easily. Today using WAVE, they experience the benefit of twice the previous number of design iterations, including analysis validation, in 25% of the time.
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An Agent of Change: Unigraphics NX WAVE in Design Modeling Design Creation and Validation, February 2004
FIGURE 1: GE Aircraft Engine Unigraphics WAVE Model FIGURE 1: GE Aircraft Engine Unigraphics WAVE Model
Courtesy of UGS PLM Solutions
KOENIG & BAUER AG A European manufacturer of large-scale printing presses reports WAVE allows them to do concurrent engineering without a lot of overhead. Dr. Rainer Hofmann of Koenig & Bauer AG notes that they benefit in having a singlesource WAVE position control structure that allows them to define alternative product variants, e.g., twenty different position configurations. Now they are able to sell the “same” machine to multiple clients, each of which has unique requirements for the positioning of the printing subassemblies within the overall machine, allowing it to fit in different customer printing halls (different geometry and topology). FIGURE 2: Koenig & Bauer’s Commander Web Press Used for Printing Newspapers and Other Large Tasks
Courtesy of Koenig & Bauer AG
FIGURE 2: Koenig & Bauer’s Commander Web Press Used for Printing Newspapers and Other Large Tasks
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An Agent of Change: Unigraphics NX WAVE in Design Modeling Design Creation and Validation, February 2004
A U.S. COMPRESSOR MANUFACTURER A U.S. compressor manufacturer lists a cycle time reduction of 50% through the use of parametric modeling to automate components for their compressor product line. Critical to the company’s design methodology is the inclusion of inprocess states for rough-cut, final machining, and weldments. The company’s development process uses spreadsheet parameters to drive the creation of “master seed models” which are then linked through WAVE to in-process models. This allows changes in finished models to drive changes in the rough-cut counterparts. The use of WAVE mitigated the design organization expending considerable effort to create associations between in-process models using interpart expressions to capture all the needed information. The level of understanding between creators and users of those structures varied, with difficulties arising whenever it was necessary to edit an inter-part link. The ability of WAVE to manage such connections has led them to explore an expanded deployment of WAVE in their future development. Each of these company examples highlight the use of WAVE technology as an agent of change, around which their design organizations have been able to improve upon the key aspects of their engineering process, be it in facilitating communication between specialists, managing multiple configurations, or reducing product development cycle time.
PRODUCT CONTROL The Unigraphics NX WAVE construct exploits parametric design within a concurrent assembly-modeling environment and, as such, represents a next step upward in parametric design. In real world engineering processes, product design flows top down from requirements on function, form, fit, configuration, and other global considerations. Simply building large complex parametric assemblies composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of component parts from the bottom up overloads the capacity of a CAD authoring system, and users get lost in the maze of inter-relationships between geometries. WAVE allows product companies to encode their most important design variables, functions, constraints, and interface relationships that drive their product design within a single associative control structure for a given product class (Figure 3). That one control structure can then be re-executed repeatedly with varied inputs to produce “seed” models for a given product variant – providing a consistent, intelligent design process that allows an organization to adopt a coherent design methodology to make continued improvements.
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An Agent of Change: Unigraphics NX WAVE in Design Modeling Design Creation and Validation, February 2004
FIGURE 3: Unigraphics NX WAVE Control Structure
FIGURE 3: Unigraphics NX WAVE Control Structure Changes to control parameters automatically update all subordinate components. For example, the design of a new airplane evolves from major high-level requirements on a finite set of critical values, such as capacity, range, number of engines, number of aisles, maintenance requirements, and FAA regulations. These driving parameters often influence design direction up front at the conceptual level. WAVE allows the capture of the crucial product variables, company intellectual property formulas for their calculation, and inter-relationships of product sub-systems within an assembly hierarchy separate from actual detailed part models. Variables remain associative, and provide for automatic propagation of change throughout the structure. In addition, data management software already in place for component geometry part assemblies extends into the management of the hierarchical control structure to allow variations and revisions of the overall product assembly.
SYSTEMS ENGINEERING THROUGH WAVE Users can exploit WAVE technology to construct in essence a mechanical schematic of their 3D product design, defining how model components and subassemblies interact with each other. Users can step beyond merely controlling spatial sizing of components and subassemblies to managing the physics of mechanical interactions – supporting the efforts in the systems engineering of complex products. CAD design focuses on the representation of product geometry. A systems engineering product representation focuses on the interaction of subsystems and components that come together to deliver the functionality of the product. In effect, systems engineering provides input regarding what is feasible – derived from the internal perspective of what the company and its suppliers can do. However, once systems engineering has defined the design attributes for the product, it must interact with designers on product design tradeoffs and their impact on fulfilling requirements.
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An Agent of Change: Unigraphics NX WAVE in Design Modeling Design Creation and Validation, February 2004
Because a WAVE control structure employs the Unigraphics NX geometry/assembly data structure, a product design team can encapsulate a wide range of governing data types, parameters, and mathematical equations to guide the logic of a design. The control structure hierarchy may contain reference datum planes, sketches, critical coordinate locations, and actual geometry to specify product constraints for mating conditions or component part envelopes (or volumes). In addition, changes in the control structure data can drive product configuration changes, such as component part or subassembly swapping.
WAVE AS AN AGENT OF CHANGE Beyond pure modeling technique, Unigraphics NX WAVE encourages conceptual stage agreements, compelling engineering teams to look at key design criteria early in the design process and to think through a product’s design structure, interfaces, and dependencies up front. Through the control structure, WAVE organizes workflow to enable concurrent engineering. Simple CAD authoring captures product models; WAVE promotes a deeper understanding of a product’s design, design reuse, and standardization of the design process. These attributes contribute to WAVE’s ability to act as an agent of change within an engineering organization, helping to deliver better products – faster and cheaper – with a direct impact on the company’s bottom line.
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