Major North American Automotive Manufacturer reports Positive Outcomes of Serviceability Studies using Kineo Path Planner™

Deployment of new methodology based on Kineo technology for part removal virtual simulations

Kineo C.A.M. announced that a Major North American Automotive Manufacturer deploys a new serviceability methodology for all part removal virtual simulations. This methodology is based on Kineo Path PlannerTM and takes full advantage of the advanced Dynamic Collision Checking capabilities offered by Kineo CAM’s technology.

“With our former methodology, serviceability studies could not be conducted optimally when collision detection processes were involved”, explains Sethupathy Kathiresan, Knowledge Based Engineering Analyst.

“The part removal simulations took several hours (approx. 2-3 hours or even more) of manual transformation for an experienced analyst time, which represents about 20–25% of the total time to complete serviceability assessment studies. This, in turns, limited the number of assessments which could be scheduled and completed in support of serviceability.

Today, Serviceability studies that require part disassembly path simulations are fed into Kineo Path Planner™ in order to find a feasible and quick extraction path.

Finding an extraction path controlled by the dynamic collision checker now takes an average of 5-6 minutes, which means about 2 hours or 76% computation time reduction on each part removal assessment compared to the former methodology.

The generated paths and the corresponding swept volumes are the starting points for future data re-use within the vehicle program buck.”

“Beyond the significant productivity gain on virtual maintenance checks, it is interesting to note that the whole virtual product development chain is positively influenced by Kineo dynamic collision checking technology”, says Mickael Reux, Business Development Manager, Kineo CAM. “Indeed, with Kineo Path Planner™, it is now easy and fast to take into account all assembly, disassembly, maintenance, and part interchangeability constraints directly on the Digital Mockup and to precisely document those. This valuable design information, putting forward accurate and relevant design modifications and considerations, can be made available at very early stages of the virtual product conception, thus avoiding to be confronted to Serviceability or Manufacturability issues detected too late”.

Outcome of serviceability studies involving Kineo

• Generated optimal extraction path within 5-6 minutes (cycle time reduction)
• Average reduction in computation time for path extraction = 76%
• Average time saved on part removal assessments per study is approximately 2 hours
• Generated paths and swept volumes are the starting points for future data re-use

About Kineo Path Planner™
Using its advanced Dynamic Collision checking, Kineo Path Planner™ “KPP” is specialized in automatically finding and generating collision-free trajectories within your 3D Digital Mock-up and therefore serves industrial needs such as mounting and dismounting component parts, feasibility studies of human or robotic tasks in constrained virtual environments.
More information on Kineo Path Planner™

About Kineo C.A.M.
Kineo CAM, granted 2005 IEEE/IFR Innovation Award, is the independent software developer of the worldwide leading technology for Automatic Motion and Path Planning, KineoWorks™. Being focused on the development of unmatched efficient Software Solutions dedicated to Dynamic Collision Checking, Kineo CAM is widely recognized by large organizations in such industrial markets as automotive, aerospace, nuclear and ship building.

For more information, visit www.kineocam.com.

The End of Tech Support Frustration?

Sooner or later, no matter how good your design platforms and applications are, you’ll hit a problem that you can’t solve on your own. It may be hardware, software or application related, or maybe you aren’t sure just which it is. Instead of spending hours logging an issue through traditional technical support channels, you may want to take advantage of a service from HP that is helping more and more CATIA users solve their technical issues quickly and without the administrative fuss sometimes associated with tech support calls. And this support is not limited to CATIA V4 or V5 but covers the complete portfolio of products, CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA, VPM and SMARTEAM.

catia@hp.com is a service offered within the framework of the HP / Dassault Systèmes Strategic Alliance and implemented through the HP/ Dassault Systèmes Product Lifecycle Management Competence Center (HP-DS PLM CC) in Paris. When you send an e-mail to catia@hp.com it is distributed to a group of thirty HP professionals from all over the world with extensive expertise in the Dassault Systèmes portfolio of products (CATIA, DELMIA, SMARTEAM, ENOVIA and SIMULIA) when used on HP hardware running either Microsoft Windows or HPUX operating system. Typically, messages are handled on the country level in your native language, but, if necessary, they are translated into English and resent to the distribution list or the Competence Center in Paris for detailed analysis. In either case, the turnaround time for most e-mails is very short.

catia@hp.com does not replace existing support contracts. Instead, it acts as a time-to-resolution enhancement tool for questions for which you cannot immediately determine the cause. Besides resolving technical issues, catia@hp.com can also help you tune and optimize your workstation environment for the highest, most reliable performance.

Specific types of issues can range from recommended configurations, system certification and benchmarking, patches and service pack pre-requisites, to graphics drivers and shared library parameters. The answers can include a specific recipe for resolution, pointers to solutions at www.hp.com/go/catia, or a confirmation of problem reproduction with a request to open an official problem report (PMR) within the framework of your support contract with Dassault Systèmes.

Timeliness is the main benefit for the majority of customers. You get the answers you need without the bureaucratic hassles, and reporting documentation. A simple e-mail to catia@hp.com gets the process started. Experience shows that the majority of issues can be resolved within 1-2 email exchanges. Customers also appreciate the personal contact with knowledgeable specialists who are concerned about the total solutions of Dassault Systèmes. This high level of service and time saved resolving issues allows you to get back into production faster.

When you purchase HP systems for Dassault's portfolio of products, you get the full support of the HP-DS PLM CC at no extra cost. Along with catia@hp.com, you have access to www.hp.com/go/catia, a website that contains a specialized knowledge database collected over twelve years of collaboration onsite in the Dassault development and maintenance labs, as well as special utilities, information on configurations, installation prerequisites, FAQs and hints and tips to help optimize CATIA V4 and/or V5 on HP platforms. This huge benefit can save thousands of dollars in lost time and improved productivity—and only HP offers this enhanced service.

Whether you have only a few CATIA V5 platforms or thousands of licenses, catia@hp.com can work for you, helping you to be more productive and more competitive.

Powerful CATIA Data Exchange Based on SMARTEAM
Diane Benjuya

Packaged for Delivery: SMARTEAM’s capabilities for reconciling 3D CATIA data across design environments.

GET READY TO RECONCILE!
The supply chain faces daily obstacles in getting its work done, burdened by complex data exchange methodologies, threats to design integrity, manual entry of OEM data and other interaction pains. SMARTEAM’s powerful new engineering package exchange tool (SMARTEAM – CATIA Supply Chain Engineering Exchange - SEE) provides a swift, cost-effective collaborative solution to these challenges and more.

SEE enables suppliers to interactively compare and reconcile a set of CATIA assemblies and parts coming from an OEM or other supplier with those stored in a targeted SMARTEAM installation, while preserving all relational links and data integrity.

Any CATIA-SMARTEAM site can use SEE to collaborate with any other CATIA site, including OEMs using ENOVIA or SMARTEAM, suppliers using SMARTEAM, and another with alternative PDM.

Seamlessly accessed through the SMARTEAM menu, SEE lets CATIA users import packages of 3D engineering data – assemblies, drawings, parts and/or analysis documents. After loading the source in CATIA V5, users identify and compare documents common to both source and target. Advanced queries, application of business rules, such as to file naming, and other knowledge management features optimize reconciliation and related decision-making. SEE helps suppliers improve productivity and quality, while adding muscle to their competitive edge: a supplier of windows for car doors can ensure that the glazing is a tight and accurate fit with the OEM’s latest model for the door. A Frankfurt-based supplier can collaborate with a small team of engineers at its Seoul-based sales office, capturing product configuration input closest to the customer. A backlogged engineering unit can rapidly parcel out work off-site to meet delivery targets. End users can enjoy productivity gains through offline work on extracted files, relying on SEE to import them smoothly back into SMARTEAM.

SEE joins multi-site, Web, and community portals in providing robust SMARTEAM enterprise and supply chain collaboration. “SEE powerfully expresses SMARTEAM’s overall value proposition: giving the mid-market competitive edge through fast, flexible, low cost of ownership collaboration,” comments Stéphane Deleville, SMARTEAM European competency center manager at DS.

More information on SEE will be available upon V5R16 release.

Collaboration Solutions: Setting Your Priorities
Robert de Monts

Pressured to deliver products faster to market and at lower costs, enterprises are increasingly distributing their product development activities around the globe and across networks of business partners. This trend is further accelerated by the ubiquitous communication medium of the Internet. As a result, employees increasingly need to constantly interact with geographically dispersed teams both within and outside the enterprise to design new products, support customers or work with partners, suppliers and vendors.

This and the impact of the outsourcing model are fueling growth in the hot market of collaboration solutions. Web collaboration alone (excluding intelligent data sharing, as provided by distributed Product Data Management solutions) today is around $500M and is expected to grow to over $1B by 2008 (20% CAGR). Add VoIP, video, and intelligent data/application sharing collaboration solutions and you can more than triple these numbers.

Everyone’s dream is to collaborate within the distributed enterprise and across the enterprise ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers through an integrated and secure collaboration environment that combines video, VoIP, IM, and instantaneous intelligent data sharing. At present, such a solution does not exist at an affordable cost of ownership (bandwidth, hardware, software, and deployment costs), or at a level of quality that supports productivity claims.

For example, I have used IP-based video conferencing equipment to run regular distributed team meetings across continents. Seeing colleagues over video does create a more bonded team experience than talking with them over the phone. But often, we resolved to continue the meeting using phone teleconference only. The limited quality of the video, or the quality of the accompanying sound, or even the stability of the system often became more distracting than the content of the meeting.

The bottom line is: before investing in a collaboration solution, you need to clearly decide on your priorities:

• Do I need a solution for communicating inside my own enterprise, or outside with customers and partners, or for both environments?
• To achieve productivity gains, do I absolutely need to share the actual data and applications, or will I achieve sufficient results by simply sharing views of the data?
• Are my enterprise environment and my enterprise ecosystem of partners and customers sufficiently homogenous that I can expect them to use the same applications and data—or at least compatible applications and data?
• How much time and resources can I afford to acquire in order to implement, support and maintain a collaboration solution? Can I impose this on my partners and customers? Can they afford this?
• How secure do my communications need to be? How critical is it for my business if proprietary information is eavesdropped on or leaked into the wrong hands?
• Is attending a scheduled “web meeting” good enough? Or do I need instant access to my remote colleagues or partner teams, whenever they come online? Does collaboration need to be real time, instantaneous?
• What are the issues that need to be discussed? Can they be described in words? Or still pictures? Or video?

Are your collaboration needs satisfied with scheduled conference room-like meetings where users get together at a set time, invited by a conference owner into a set conference room, to discuss a defined topic? Then many solutions, mostly offered as a service, are available to you as the web-based meeting market is quite mature. The solutions are generally application agnostic (can work with any application than runs on your desktop, although performance may vary), and non-intrusive (may require a light weight client download). The cost of ownership is small, although watch for services fees, especially if voice communication costs are additive.

Is it critical that your collaborators share the actual data, either the specific application data or perhaps structured (meta) data about the data? Then look into solutions ranging from office automation information sharing, to database sharing. Collaboration-oriented extensions of PDM (Project Data Management) systems and their different native application integration stacks fall into this category of products. They offer collaboration at the greatest level of data depth and intelligence. However they come with a price. Collaborating teams need to be using the same application infrastructure. The cost of ownership is high in user training, software costs, deployment and ongoing maintenance costs. Data synchronization latency across WANs do not allow for instantaneous ad-hoc sharing. Because intelligent structured data has to be communicated to the other party over regular application protocols, for security reasons most companies will not allow their use for cross company communications.

If timely communication over design data is critical to shorten your time to market, you need to be aware of you colleagues’ availability at any time. As soon as they become available, you want to share the information with a click of a mouse in order to quickly resolve the issue. Any hour wasted on setting up communications over a specific issue can quickly add up to weeks or months of product delays. Scheduled, conference room meetings are no longer sufficient. You need the same peer-to-peer, cubicle-to-cubicle interaction that you can get with your closest colleagues in order to quickly address all the issues that may prevent you from releasing product design on time. Often all you need to have is a shared view of the data to address most issues. Speed, ease of use and deployment, and instant accessibility are most important.

If you recognize yourself in the situation described above, a new breed of collaboration solutions can address your needs for instant, secure, integrated, non-intrusive, cross company collaboration. This next-generation solution leverages the benefits of IM (instantaneous communications, presence awareness), the benefits of web conferencing, and the most recent security paradigms to provide a working environment to dispersed teams similar to what they would have if working in the same office. Users are aware of their colleagues’ availability and can seamlessly and instantaneously connect to share application views, chat via voice and text and interact securely between virtual teams across company boundaries.

Robert de Monts, a former VP at Dassault Systems, is VP Marketing and Business Development at Imera Systems, Inc (www.imera.com). Imera will exhibit its TeamLinks collaboration solution at COE 2006, in Atlanta. Robert can be reached at rdemonts@imera.com

ASC Moves to ‘Design-Analyze-Confirm’ Process with Integrated Simulation Tools - Part 1

Few would argue the powerful attraction of a sunny day, an open road, and a convertible-top vehicle – it’s a common visual cue for freedom. One company known around the world for its commitment to the advancement of open-air engineering is ASC International.

Founded in 1965 as American Sunroof Company and headquartered in Southgate, Michigan, ASC helps automakers design, engineer, and manufacture high-impact, low-volume specialty vehicle programs. The company’s award-winning programs include the first retractable hardtop on a truck chassis, the 2003 Chevrolet SSR, which won a 2003 Chrysler Group Gold Award and a Gold Award in the 2004 Industrial Design Excellence Awards. ASC has also developed convertible systems for the Toyota Solara and Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder, and numerous appearance programs and body packages for such products as the Dodge SRT-4, Dodge Viper SRT-10, and Pontiac Grand Am SC/T. The company’s passion for innovation is obvious from its list of ‘firsts’: the first modern retractable hardtop, the first factory-installed power sunroof in North America, the first inwardly folding convertible top, the first glass panel sunroof, and the first modular sunroof. Its latest advance, the patent-pending xpanse™ Convertible-Top System, was unveiled in January 2005 on the ASC Helios, the world’s first modern four-door convertible.

In the following two-part article, Stephen Doncov, a CAE specialist at ASC, provides in-depth insight into their use of SimDesigner for CATIA, MSC Software’s integrated, multidiscipline simulation tool for early design validation in the CATIA V5 environment.

A convertible top header latch, which secures the front bow of a convertible top to the windshield frame structure, is a complex mechanism with as many as 10 or 20 parts made of different materials that deform plastically differently. These types of latches are challenging for CAE software because of the many design issues and tradeoffs to be considered, such as contacts, joints, flexible bodies, and multiple material properties. The ASC design engineering team had been making do with linear analysis, which could show where issues existed, but was unable to address the high nonlinear stress ranges ASC’s products experience. Additionally, ASC was looking to streamline its product development processes with integrated tools to minimize the time and cost of designing and testing latches.

The ASC design engineering team determined that an integrated CAD-CAE environment provided by embedded CAE tools was best suited to perform up-front analysis. In turn, these virtual product development (VPD) tools allow validation of operational effort, load capacity, and abuse testing. The VPD tools are part of ASC’s strategy for migrating to “Design-Analyze-Confirm” processes and away from “Design-Build-Test-Break” processes.

The design engineering team’s task was to ensure that the top header latch mechanism functioned within customer-supplied requirements for operational effort, abuse, and load capacity. Although the design was built in CATIA V4, CATIA V5 FEA/DMU Kinematics and MSC Software’s SimDesigner were utilized. During an earlier evaluation, the V5 analysis tools were found to be robust, quick, and easy to use because the V5 generative design approach utilizes feature recognition. When features on a part are changed, it is automatically remeshed. Using V5 models and a generative approach, the productivity gain more than made up for the time lost converting the V4 models.

For this header latch, it was particularly important to identify areas of nonconformance and provide feedback that could be used to make engineering changes. The results were validated in SimDesigner with physical testing from a previous latch design. The analysis closely matched the areas of high stress and failure identified with physical testing. Furthermore, analysis of the redesign indicated no failures, which also correlated with physical tests.

Figure 1. 3D Contacts

Because the SimDesigner Motion workbench considers the physics of the model, it allows interaction between bodies. For this analysis, 3D contacts were utilized. As shown in Figure 1, all of the contacts were modeled, including the hook-to-roll pin, handle stop-to-detent spring, lock button-to-mounting bracket, lock button-to-handle, idler-to-handle in two places, handle-to-lock button, and hook-to-receiver. The leaf springs were approximated, using linear spring-dampers with a revolute (hinge) joint where the pivot would be.

Another factor for consideration was that the production method for many of the parts is different than the one used for making a physical prototype. For example, prototype die-cast zinc parts are made using investment casting. Consequently, a different material could be used in the prototype. Typically, the properties of the material in a physical prototype are lower, which makes the final determination of the production part properties more difficult. The confidence in an analytical model representing a production unit or assembly is much higher because the properties of the die-cast (production) material are used. Without analysis, the possibility existed for over-engineering the part.

For this latch, customer requirements included operating range, abuse (vertical and side force), and maximum load. A motion simulation was used to determine if the effort required to open and close the latch met the 40 to 60N requirement. Three nonlinear analyses were run to determine the effects of abuse, including a 600N opening force on the latch handle, a side load of 294N, and a maximum load of 4900N applied to the hook. This last requirement was to ensure the mechanism wouldn’t break under some extraordinary and unforeseen event.

Figure 2. CATIA’s DMU Kinematics

CATIA’s DMU Kinematics tool (Figure 2) was used to move the model to the fully opened position. SimDesigner’s Motion workbench was used to build the model’s motion constraints, including the handle to ground, and to insert the torsional springs by hooking the clamp body to roll pin 1 and the lock button to the long roll pin.

Motion Analysis Study-Operational Effort

The model of the header latch mechanism was created using CATIA’s DMU Kinematics tool to move the handle to the fully opened position. The handle was constrained to ground, which actuates the model. Torsional springs were inserted between the hook clamp body and roll pin 1, and between the lock button and the long roll pin. The leaf springs were approximated using linear springs and dampers for the handle detent spring and the handle-to-idler spring.

The latch mechanism is quite complex and involves a lot of contact and features that cannot be modeled kinematically. Kinematics approximates the operation of the latch, but doesn’t consider the physics. The motion analysis in the SimDesigner Motion workbench, which is based on the Adams solver, considers the physics. For example, it determines if the springs are too strong or too weak and provides force deflection curves. Kinematics or animation software can’t do that.

The stroke of the latch was simulated with a prismatic joint, allowing the receiver to travel along the stroke direction of the latch. The approximate load of the top cover was modeled by utilizing a linear spring along the travel path. As the receiver is pulled, the load increases from zero to a maximum value.

The motion study confirmed the proper operation of the latching system, including the interaction of latch handle and idler bracket. The latch capture range (latch stroke) was verified along with the operation of the handle lock. However, SimDesigner identified spikes of 77N and 88N in the effort required to move the handle, exceeding the requirement of 40 to 60N. Looking at the mechanism as it engaged clearly showed the dowel pin bottoming out before the handle locked. This caused the spike in force. By using a finer hook adjustment, the handle locked before the dowel pin bottomed out in its receiver.

Figure 3. The force required to close the latch mechanism was found to exceed the specified range.

Part 2 of this article will describe ASC’s use of the SimDesigner Nonlinear workbench capabilities and the improvements realized in transitioning to a more efficient “Design-Analyze-Confirm” process.

For more information on ASC International: http://www.ascglobal.com
For more information on SimDesigner: http://simdesigner.mscsoftware.com