Enhancing Productivity in Design by Front Loading and Simultaneous Engineering Using CAD Morphing 2020-01-0496

Automotive OEMs are launching multiple products with ever reducing development time, balancing costs, quality and time to market, with clear focus on performance and weight. Platform architecture concepts, modular designs for differentiation etc. are strategies adopted by automotive OEMs towards shorter development cycles. Thus, concept generation phase of the digital product development process is expected to enable generation and evaluation of multiple concept architectures, carry out performance studies and largely focus on optimization, upfront. This Front loading of engineering and call for simultaneous engineering requires support in terms of quick and good CAD modeling with maturity. This paper proposes a process that focuses on generation and evaluation of multiple concepts, besides enabling optimization of concept before the detailed design phase kicks in. The process reduces the concept development cycle time and effort while ensuring the current digital tools can be used for evaluation. The paper presents CAD Morphing as enabler towards quick generation of concepts and geometry changes. The Morphed CAD thus can be used in existing evaluation tools for performance, feasibility, and cost and weight estimation. The morphed CAD also enables upfront collaboration/integration across partners/stake holders within and outside the organization. The proposed approach using CAD morphing technique enables simultaneous engineering in the true sense as CAD is available in very short time early on and it is detailed enough to check performance, packaging, compliance to geometric design rules, manufacturing feasibility, CAE, and Weight estimation besides enabling evaluation of gaps, flushness, and initial ergonomics. The CAD Maturity with this approach is much better and is enabling higher level of accuracy of evaluation in the early stage itself. The paper also discusses and presents the improvement to the concept design phase and significant gain in terms of time.