My first car was a red Volkswagen Beetle which I bought as a student with my grand-father’s budget for 3900 German Mark (equivalent of 1900 Euro).

Money was scarce those days and therefore I happily performed the generic service checks and overhauls myself using a do-it-yourself book called “How to maintain your Beetle”.

I never forget the effort and hassle it was for me changing the four spark plugs on the rear side of that Boxer engine. It was necessary that I literally dove into the engine hood (that is at the backside of the car) and over-stretched my arm in reaching the position where the plugs were found, then blindly fiddled around to set the wrench tool for unscrewing them. My whole body hurt after this services session!

Of course the engineers who developed the famous Beetle engine did not have yet 3D PLM at their hands, neither they had our partner Kineo’s Path Planning application which integrates with Dassault Systèmes’ CATIA, DELMIA and 3DVIA solutions.

So they were not yet able to digitally simulate during their design stage how assembly and service tasks can be performed, in an early stage of the product development using a 3D digital mock-up.

If they could have tested this they would have found out that the body stretch of a person servicing the spark plugs was too difficult and they probably would have redesigned their positions to make them easier to be accessed.

Today’s engineers have the possibility to let Kineo’s 3D intelligence do this magic on their designs, to find collision free motion paths in a 3D assembly environment under given constraints, e.g. how a human body can cope with a given geometry, also how a robot can be dimensioned and programmed to perform specific tasks.

Tests show that dynamic collision detections are performed as fast as 0.8 milliseconds on large 3D models of more than three million polygons. With this it is possible to verify a large number of design alternatives and case studies.

Kineo is a Dassault Systèmes partner since 2005 with the CAA V5 program, and has now extended this cooperation to offer their technology on the V6 platform.

One major use case is in simulating manufacturing assembly processes to forecast accessibility issues in the virtual simulation which could create costly bottlenecks in production. As a result, optimized designs and assemblies result in better manufacturability and the abilty to perform services.

Airbus is using the Kineo solution integrated with DELMIA for final assembly check for example in the A350 program (read whole story).

A second use case lies in the optimization of servicing procedures, where the Kineo application integrated in 3DVIA Composer finds the best way to assemble or disassemble parts while avoiding collisions. Watch this video that explains how this works.

What do you think of this capability? Do you like what you see?

Soon more from the wonderful world of engineering.

Best,

Michael

How do you explain Product Lifecycle Management, aka PLM, to your CEO?

This second video in our Elementary Collection takes you through the whole strategy.

Pump up the volume and enjoy!

What do you like in this definition?

Best,

Kate

Safety first. You hear it quite often because it’s on people’s minds. It’s also important for car manufacturers, and many brag about their vehicles’ safety in television ads. So like many others, when I went shopping for a car recently, safety was at the top of my list. But how do I judge how safe a car is?

I asked my local mechanically-inclined friends. Several criteria actually make a car safe, but I found out that the metal structure of a car is hugely important.

Take spot welds, for example. Sheet metal parts are often bonded together by applying pressure and high electrical currents at specific points called spot welds. This makes the joined parts stronger, safer, and more uniform in appearance.

Spot welds not only make a vehicle safer, but can also help in reducing rattles and road noises. I learned that spot welds are used throughout a vehicle – up to 5,000 spot welds in one car! Who knew?

That sounded pretty safe to me and looking for a vehicle with this amount of spot welding definitely impressed me. Since they are done early in the vehicle production, I had to trust that they were there. I found out that a good spot weld can’t easily been seen in the finished vehicle.

Feeling pretty confident in my new knowledge of spot welds and car safety, I pressed on with my purchasing research.

Okay, so 5,000 spot welds are good, but does it matter how the welds get there? Apparently it does.

Industrial robots are typically used to spot weld sheet metal parts together. The “old way” of programming spot welding robots is by hand on the factory floor, which interrupts automobile production.

The “new way” is to ensure the welding is accurate by programming the robots offline on a personal computer, all without stopping the production line. This reduces manufacturing costs, which keeps car prices down.

All of that means to me: a safer car without the high price. This was definitely worth the research.

Feel like taking a glance at how it works? Watch the video!  It shows our digital spot welding in action.

Well, if you want to know the truth, safety was number two on my list of “must haves” in a car… The color red was first.

What’s at the top of your list?

Best,

Therese