NAFEMS Americas and Digital Engineering (DE) teamed up (once again) to present CAASE, the (now Virtual) Conference on Advancing Analysis & Simulation in Engineering, on June 16-18, 2020!

CAASE20 brought together the leading visionaries, developers, and practitioners of CAE-related technologies in an open forum, unlike any other, to share experiences, discuss relevant trends, discover common themes, and explore future issues, including:
-What is the future for engineering analysis and simulation?
-Where will it lead us in the next decade?
-How can designers and engineers realize its full potential?
What are the business, technological, and human enablers that will take past successful developments to new levels in the next ten years?

Resource Abstract

Traditional methods to shorten Product Development Cycle (PDC) times have shown an inverse relation between development time and cost, and that shorter development times tend to increase the overall cost. Furthermore, the development time topic is often distorted by the erroneous assumption that development time and design quality are positively related: the longer time spent on design, the better the design of the final product will be. This assumption makes difficult to explore new options to successfully complete the PDC, resulting in less innovation and blocking possibilities for market expansion as current development resources are allocated to non-value adding activities.



However, current PDC show a tendency to get shortened triggered by customer needs and high demand for new products. Consequently, exploring and applying new product development options that can shorten PDC times without giving in quality, costs and customer needs has become an important goal of management and is no longer an option, but a necessity.



In order to optimize PDC times, it is important to identify the stagnation points and their causes. A major development phase, where resources add no value and often cause delays on the overall planning, is the waiting times for validation of new and redesigned products. Physical resources such as transportation of samples, creation of prototypes, use of specialized machines and testing rigs, as well as human resources to execute and analyze test data are used, which make the whole process extremely complex and expensive.



The continuous change of customer needs and high demand for new products require that validation process is completed as soon as possible, in order to advance to further development stages, reducing the overall PDC time.



In this work, the success story of three cases using rapid prototyping, FEA and reverse engineering with 3D scanning technologies, where physical validation of products was replaced by means of digitalization of physical parts, virtual validation and standardization for future developments, are presented. Additionally, the benefits and challenges of migrating from the traditional physical validation process to consistent and easily repeatable virtual tests are explored.



To achieve this, current physical validation experiments which account the main stagnation points were identified and categorized by the impact level to the development time and cost. Moreover, the feasibility and likelihood of the test to be used in future developments were analyzed to select the most suitable ones for the virtualization of the process. The virtual models for testing were compared with existing test data showing the results correlation, and the viability of the migration of more validation tests. The use of virtual validation models, which are available almost instantly, from anywhere and with great accuracy are a big leap to shorten PDC times while still reducing development costs.