Today, product developers and fabricators face a unique set of challenges that stretch engineering capabilities to the limits. Consumer goods producers are striving to evolve more complex shapes and designs to appeal to continually changing customer needs and tastes. Many of the products produced are one-of-a-kind creations designed to bring a new concept to life, to increase production rates, or to lower costs.

The ability to create new machines rapidly and easily can help developers succeed. With the latest industry CAD/CAM/CAE/PLM Solutions, they can reuse previous design work to create multiple variations of a product in a single document. They can also develop and manage families of parts and models with different dimensions, components, properties, or other parameters. One signicant time-saving strategy would be to develop 80 to 90 percent of each new product by using standard modules and components, and then using streamlined engineering processes to develop the other 10 to 20 percent in minimal time.

However, the need for speed need not compel poorly designed products. When it comes to product development, you have to get it right the first time; and if you don't, it can mean costly expenses. Getting it right means designing a product that not only can perform well during acceptance testing, but also under normal working conditions for the products lifetime - and under environmental conditions that can vary from dusty and particulate to damp.

Contract Services can provide the set of tools necessary to meet these challenges. You can utilize existing subsystems and assemblies developed by your company, as well as those from industry standards groups and components producers. You can take advantage of a wide range of design validation tools for evaluating a product prototype, so you can identify and fix problems before you even build your product. Additionally, you can utilize a 3D assembly model to quickly create project documentation.

Component Selection

Anywhere between 20 and 70 percent of the content of many typical product designs consists of purchased components, such as motors, drives, bearings, and hydraulic cylinders. As a result, developers can be forced to redesign purchased and commonly used components with each project. However, a contract design service provides access to parts design libraries, with a wide range of standard, vendor-specific, and internal company design libraries; making the addition of new parts to your machine simple. You can easily access 3D CAD models from leading components manufacturers - saving time and improving accuracy.

A good contract design service will be able to incorporate ANSI, ISO, DIN, and JIS standard parts, such as fasteners, bearings, retaining rings, and gears. They can drag and drop bolts, nuts, and washers and snap them into place on your assembly in just minutes.

When the product you build is one-of-a-kind, you need to design it right before it goes into production. Contract design services provide a wide range of virtual prototyping tools that can help you correctly identify and solve design problems up front. In addition to viewing the components, subassemblies, and the complete assemblies from all angles, you can examine internal components at any stage of the design process. Plus, you can move components through their full range of motion, automatically identifying clearances and detecting interferences. With the ability to find problems early in the process, you can quickly communicate design intent to your customers, manufacturing, and maintenance.

With the production-level drawings and detailing capabilities of contract services, you can quickly and accurately develop drawings from the 3D design - including the automatic generation of orthographic, section, and detail views. Any change to the 3D model is accurately reflected in all project drawings automatically.

Large Assemblies

Contract services provide the ability to model machines with tens of thousands of components. With top-down design, you can tie together interrelated components; so if one changes, the related components will also change. You can use this powerful feature to take full advantage of the assembly model. For example, you can use 2D layout sketches as assembly skeletons to control large, complex assemblies. When the skeleton is changed, the linkage and other components will automatically reflect the correct dimensions.

Computer Aided Design is used at various stages in the apparel and textile industry. The fashion design CAD/CAM software can be broadly classified into following categories, each relating to a different design and manufacturing stage.

Categories and manufacturing stages are:

Designing/ Range Planning - before the start of any fashion season, all apparel manufacturers plan the range of garments which they are setting up to manufacture. Most of the designing and range planning is still done by the buyer or the owners of the brand because they are closest to their actual clients; it is easier for them to understand the specific needs of their target market. To some extent, this has now changed with more and more manufacturers allowing vendors to dabble a bit in designing, based on their specific inputs in terms of colors, yarns, fabrics, prints, silhouettes etc.

Prototyping/ Sampling - once the designs have been finalized, a prototype or sample has to be made, because the scalability of the end product (garment) very much depends on the fit of the garment.

In a study conducted by an independent research agency, which monitored and observed the reasons of dissatisfaction or returns of garments sold - fitting problems topped the dissatisfaction list.

Considering the importance of a good fit, it becomes imperative for a manufacturer or retailer to achieve the best fits possible. Considering the complexity involved with different fabrics and silhouettes, a CAD system takes away much of the pain from prototyping thus decreasing the time to market.

Mass Production - comes with its own challenges. Unlike most other products, apparel manufacturing, even today very much depends on people - especially when it comes to tailoring or assembling. A mistake anywhere down the line in the prototyping or cutting process becomes very difficult and often impossible to rectify. This is where a CAD system comes in, to deskill some of the processes involved in mass manufacturing, namely the pre-production processes so that perfectly cut parts are fed to the operators. Additionally, the fabric saved in bulk cutting while using a CAD system is enormous.

Retailing - A 3D solution allows 3D files to be uploaded on to website for clients to choose from. 3D files can be opened and viewed in any MS office application or Internet explorer.

Mr. Saar Machtinger, Director Business Development, OptiTex™ Fashion design software [http://www.optitex.com], which specializes in the development of innovative, easy-to-operate, 2-Dimensional, and 3-Dimensional CAD/CAM Fashion Design software. [http://www.optitex.com]

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Saar_Machtinger

This lecture covers below issues:

- Design Methodology

- Product Development Process

- Revolutionary & Evolutionary Design

- Types of Design

- Design Innovation

- Design Ingredients

- Engineering & Industrial Design

and other fundamental issues of Product Design and Development

This is the first lecture of the series "Product Design and Development from Utah University.

This collection was retrieved from ZCorporation Website at zcorporation.com.

The collection contains 46 medium & high resolution images of the Z350 & Z310 3D Printer - Rapid Prototyping Machines and Prototypes made by using these machines.

These images are for free download and use for personal thesis or presentation purpose.

Courtesy: ZCorporation.

Total size ~ 250 MB

Z310 Machine & Prototypes:

Z350 Machine & Prototypes:

Link download:

Keywords: ZPrinter, Z650, ZCorp, ZCorporation, 3D Printer, 3D, Rapid Prototyping, 3D Printing, CAD, CAD CAM, Modeling, Model, Design, Product Development, STL, SolidWorks, Inventor, CATIA, Autodesk

This free download contains 13 lectures of the course "Toy Design" from Mechanical Engineering Department @ MIT.

These documents are for free download under Creative Commons License. Please refer to the source website: www.ocw.mit.edu (MIT Open CourseWare website)

All presentations are well designed with eye-catching fonts and graphics & attractive method of transferring ideas and information

Enjoy the documents ^^

This magazine is the single issue, in fact the 3rd issue of a free series of magazine published by CareerVoyages.gov - a government funded organization for careers.

This magazine contains a lot of useful information about careers in the field of Advanced Manufacturing with fascinating and eye-catching presentation.

The content of this magazine focus Advanced Manufacturing, what it is, what its sub-branches are, payment or salary, historical aspects, job descriptions,...

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