Traditionally, the evolution of a design has often been costly and time consuming to achieve. It usually involves a manual design process in which the engineer:
This process has traditionally been linked together and controlled in a hands-on fashion by the engineer. Because of the expense and time involved in pursuing the "optimum" design by traditional approach, "less than optimum" designs have often been accepted in an economic tradeoff.
Today software developers are working to replace this hands-on approach used by engineers with new tools that allow an automated intelligent process of design optimization to be used in a CAD environment. These tools integrate CAE tools such as Finite Element Analysis (FEA) with modern CAD programs allowing designers to perform "what-if " studies of various design alternatives, simulate product behavior, spot potential problems early, and optimize their designs before any hardware or prototypes are built. Design flaws that are uncovered late in product development and are expensive to correct are minimized, and more reliable, less costly designs are delivered to market more quickly.
Using these CAD integrated Design and Analysis Optimization (DAO) tools allows the designer to do things like minimize weight, maximize natural frequency, maximize heat flow and write customized equation functions, e.g. cost minimization as an example. The first such program developed by ANSYS, Inc., called ANSYS/ProFEA, was the first of many such programs available for DAO today. Other similar related software is available for Unigraphics, Solidworks, CATIA and AutoCad. For a full explanation of these programs please e-mail us with your request, or give us a call to talk with one of our trained Sales Professionals.