Optimized Design and Manufacturing of Tooling by Concurrent Engineering

Abstract

In today’s competitive age Industries are required to be more active, efficient. They need to respond fast. More and more competition calls for the fast response to buyer. In this quest maintaining quality is also a key issue. To meet this effective resource utilisation, optimised design and manufacturing of product is required. Compared with the traditional sequential design method, concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to integrate concurrent design of products and their related processes. One of the key factors to successfully implement concurrent engineering is information technology. In order to design a product and its manufacturing process simultaneously, information on product features, manufacturing requirements, and customer demands must be processed while the design is concurrently going on. There is an increased understanding of the importance of the correct decisions being made at the conceptual design and development stages that involve many complex evaluation and decision-making tasks. CAD engineers, CAE engineers and CAM engineers can work concurrently and the integration of CAD/CAM/CAE can be realized. This theory has been successfully applied to design and manufacturing of investment casting die and the results are obtained in terms of optimization and lead time reduction.