Digital prototyping in mechatronic design

Today’s manufacturers are using a mechatronics-based approach to integrate the electronic, mechanical and software components of their increasingly complex products. Digital prototyping allows disparate engineering teams to work from a single digital model, saving time and reducing errors throughout the design process.

Today’s manufacturers face unrelenting pressure to continuously develop new products. As manufacturers respond to market demands, they must deal with the added complexities of synchronising mechanical, electronic and software elements into one integrated system.

In the process, they must effectively coordinate disparate engineering teams. A mechatronics-based approach can help.

Effective mechatronics product development demands a focus on three key engineering activities:

• Multidisciplinary design and engineering. Mechatronics refers to the integration of control systems, electrical systems and mechanical systems. A mechatronics system is not just a marriage of electrical and mechanical systems, and is more than just a control system. It is a complete integration of all of them.
• Managing communication and workflow. Integration of systems should be coupled with improvements in the coordination between the discipline-specific teams that are responsible for creating individual subsystems. The often complex interrelationships between individual subsystems demand effective communication and clear ownership.
• Effective early validation. If manufacturers are going to develop cheaper, more reliable and more flexible systems, they must validate across the traditional boundaries of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, electronics and control engineering at the earliest stages of the design process.

Manufacturers that harness the best practices of mechatronics can achieve significant benefits. The best manufacturers are more able to reach their targets for development costs, product revenue and product quality, and to hit their product launch dates. Such manufacturers can also:

• Add more features and functions;
• Reduce the size, weight and cost of their products;
• Improve their overall efficiency;
• Use adaptive control and diagnostics to improve reliability and reduce maintenance costs;
• Customise or upgrade products by reprogramming embedded firmware.

In addition, a mechatronics-based approach mitigates risk and solves common design challenges such as the slow, serial machine design process; poor communication between machine designers and users; and risky physical machine testing.

If manufacturers are going to achieve all the benefits of mechatronics product design, they clearly need technology solutions that enable their design disciplines to collaborate and communicate seamlessly, while also helping them identify system-level problems early, verify that all design requirements are met and predict the behaviour of the final product.

Ideally, a mechatronics solution should support the following best practices:

• Multidisciplinary design and engineering;
• Manage communication and workflow;
• Early validation.

As the saying goes, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else.” In product development, knowing what you need is the first step to getting the final product right. Outlining product level requirements is necessary to achieve the first step in outlining product performance.

The ability to drive these key parameters into system and subsystem operational performance goals is often what sets leading manufacturers apart from their peers.

Many manufacturers assume that building a single, integrated design process across all disciplines is the best way to coordinate multidisciplinary design and engineering so that all product requirements are met.

However, extra effort spent on process engineering often goes to waste. Instead, best-in-class manufacturers use separate design processes across disciplines to use the domain expertise of their designers.

However, this requires that they be diligent in coordinating and synchronising their engineering groups. This synchronisation is the key.

This approach is a best practice that should be adopted by other manufacturers seeking to improve their mechatronics design processes. From a practical perspective, this will require manufacturers to deploy focused engineering tools that allow individual disciplines to excel at their work, while providing the ability to share information easily.

But it is not enough to be able to model these systems.

System-level performance is usually a function of the disparate engineering and design needs of various subsystems. Breaking down a system into its core constituents, therefore, demands some formality.

As a result, it is essential to establish clear processes for effectively communicating changes, and to align collaboration and system engineering tools that can help make sure teams communicate changes effectively.

As manufacturers seek to coordinate and synchronise their separate engineering groups, there are many ways to bring information together. The average company often prefers to generate the bill of materials from a user database application.

However, this method requires not only dedicated maintenance and support, but also manual synchronisation of design information - making it complex and error prone for a structure that contains thousands of parts.

Best-in-class manufacturers take advantage of discipline-specific structures for designing products. Rather than maintaining one large database across all groups, companies can use individual, discipline-specific databases that allow groups to manage their workgroup-level data and workflow at a local level.

However, even the discipline-specific approach can create problems if manufacturers do not manage it correctly. Ultimately, manufacturers must strike a balance between providing the focus that engineering disciplines require and making certain that the data they create can be brought together easily.

No one disputes that it is a good idea to resolve integration issues before committing money to tooling and manufacturing ramp-up. Leading manufacturers focus on resolving integration issues early in product development and maintain this focus right up until verification and testing.

By focusing on validation, simulation and verification earlier in the development process, manufacturers can avoid the costs and delays associated with resolving integrations later on. However, to achieve these benefits, manufacturers must bring together a wide variety of design and engineering information for review.

The goal is to synchronise the efforts of larger teams into single design reviews where all pertinent information is available at once. This is just one of the benefits of digital prototyping.

Rather than trying to integrate information from disconnected engineering systems, manufacturers can save time and money by enabling all their teams to work from the same digital model. Today, many best-in-class manufacturers are augmenting traditional physical prototyping by building digital prototypes.

By tracking and comparing physical and digital prototype test results, these companies are gaining a deeper understanding of their products and the environments in which they operate - leading to greater overall product quality.

Although manufacturers have been talking about the benefits of digital prototyping for many years, the ability to build and test a true digital prototype has, until recently, been beyond the budgets of most manufacturing companies.

However, in recent years, vendors, such as Autodesk, have introduced increasingly practical solutions that are more attainable, scalable and cost-effective than their predecessors.

Solutions for digital prototyping help manufacturers realise the full benefits of mechatronics by allowing them to quickly create and easily maintain a single, digital model. This model connects mechanical and electrical teams by bringing together design data from all phases of development for use across all disciplines.

The digital model simulates the complete product, enabling engineers to better visualise, optimise and manage their design before producing a physical prototype.

As engineering teams work on the digital prototype, Autodesk’s data management tools integrate electrical and mechanical components into a single bill of materials.

Using tightly integrated mechanical and electrical information, teams create more accurate 2D and 3D mechatronics designs in less time, enabling manufacturers to get to market faster.

By Karsten Hojberg, Director of Manufacturing Solutions, Autodesk Australia & New Zealand