Time Savings in Product Development through Continuous Simulation

Today's fast-paced economy and complex global market has made it difficult for manufacturing companies to maintain their competitive edge. Products being developed today must stand apart from others, and lead the market in the way they meet customer needs. Tools to reduce product development time have been in use for decades, but recently new tools have become available to make significant reductions in the product development cycle. Specifically, simulation tools are becoming very useful for saving time in the design-build-test phase of product development.New simulation tools that compress the product development cycle change the way design errors are found and refined. Traditional product development would create a design, prototype that design, and test it for failures, then repeat the process until the performance was acceptable. A newly developed process combines CAD, CAE, and FEA simulation tools to create an interactive feedback loop in the front part of product development to significantly reduce development time.DesignXplorer VT (DX-VT) uses CAD, CAE, and FEA to form an easy to operate virtual simulation tool that can be used by engineers and designers in multiple stages of product development. From generating innovative designs, to shedding light on how designs can be optimized for peak performance, DX-VT has tools to make product development easier. Using DX-VT in the concept design stage and throughout the CAE analysis and testing stage will give designers and engineers a complete breakdown of what design parameters need changed. I have used DX-VT to create a benchmark test of how the software can be used for product development. I have used real world virtual prototypes from Technip Inc. to evaluate the realistic applications of this software. To capture this process a best practices guide was created to be a general guide on how to efficiently use Workbench Design Modeler, Simulation, and DesignXplorer for enhancing product development. This guide was tailored to Technip Inc. and their most recent project, the Red Hawk. The best practices guide demonstrates how to use the Ansys Workbench software to simulate actual components from the Red Hawk oil rig. The guide shows all the steps and features that were required to get this real life model to solve properly. The results of this product development process will cut development time at Technip by 1000's of man hours, and help in their goal to cut design costs by $2 million per project.