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ComputerAided_Design_Engineering_amp_Manufactur.pdf

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geometric modeling, engineering analysis, and manufacturing to the design of the life cycle of the product.<br />

The life cycle includes, for ex<strong>amp</strong>le, the stages of functional specifications development, conceptual design<br />

(Kang, 1996), component design, assembly modeling, and, finally, manufacturing.<br />

In most cases, assembly is the most complex process in manufacturing, occupying approximately 50%<br />

of total manufacturing cost (Boothroyd, 1995). In order to reduce assembly cost, a designer has to come<br />

up with a design that has a minimun number of assembly processes; each assembly process has to be<br />

simple so that it can be easily achieved by manual or automatic assembly systems. This requires a great<br />

deal of communication between design engineers and manufacturing engineers. The requirements for<br />

design engineers have to agree with manufacturing methods. Evaluations have to be iterated between<br />

these two systems until an optimal design solution has been reached.<br />

In general, design criteria mainly are product specifications and manufacturing methods that can be<br />

carried by geometric constraints (Anantha, 1996; Liu, 1991). This information has to be uniformly<br />

interpreted and represented throughout the product life cycle. In this chapter, we will introduce spatial<br />

relationships (Liu, 1991), a structural representation scheme embedded with geometric information, and<br />

nongeometric constraints that carry design criteria. Spatial relationships compose the common language<br />

that communicates between design engineers and manufacturing in design considerations.<br />

Also in this chapter, we will begin with the introduction of Product Modeler (ProMod) (Nnaji, 1993), a<br />

modeling system that applies design with spatial relationships and is able to capture and represent the design<br />

evaluation criteria through assembly modeling processes (Nnaji, 1994). This is followed by discussion of<br />

subsequent developments in automatic assembly that are listed as follows:<br />

• Stability analysis of assembly (Vishnu, 1992)<br />

• Feasible approach directions and precedence constraints (Yeh, 1992)<br />

• Kinematic modeling (Aguwa, 1997; Prinz, 1994).<br />

9.2 ProMod: A Concurrent Conceptual and Product <strong>Design</strong><br />

System for Mechanical Assemblies<br />

<strong>Design</strong> process is a refinement of abstract representations where the product functionality, manufacturability,<br />

and all other life cycle issues are optimized. Existing computer-aided design systems focus on the<br />

design and analysis of components in isolation. Since these design systems are unable to support early<br />

conceptual design, a designer’s intentions (i.e., functional and geometric constraints) cannot be captured,<br />

represented, and propagated to down-stream activities. The consequence of this inability is that existing<br />

design systems are not capable of optimizing the product against life-cycle constraints, thus rendering<br />

the effort to integrate design and manufacturing unlikely to bear fruit. In this section, we introduce a<br />

new type of mechanical product modeling system, ProMod, (Nnaji, 1993; Rembold, 1991-1; Rembold,<br />

1991-2) which is not only capable of capturing and integrating the designer’s intent at conceptual-design<br />

level, but also is capable of propagating these intentions as constraints to guide the development and<br />

detailing of product design. Thus early conceptual design and product design are merged in the same<br />

computational environment (Kang and Nnaji, 1993).<br />

In ProMod, the design process begins with modeling of the abstract representation of the components.<br />

While connecting these abstract components, the designer uses spatial relationships as the peg on which<br />

to hang the representation of the designer’s intentions. In the initial realization of form, the constraints<br />

may be violated. In this case, a refinement process is applied to change the topology and geometry of<br />

the components so as to satisfy these constraints. Three subsystems, module design, connectivity design,<br />

and detailed design, as shown in Figure 9.1, are the kernel of the ProMod system. The designer uses<br />

module design to create an initial design, which may be unique or standardized, and is saved in part<br />

library. The connectivity design defines the functional and geometric constraints upon the refinement<br />

and configuration of components to meet product specifications. The detailed design contains modeling<br />

© 2001 by CRC Press LLC

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