Improve key aspects of product design with 3D CAD

Product designers are committed to creating first-class, innovative designs that turn this design into a profitable product. Seeing your own design in the mall, or knowing that customers adopt their own designs as mainstream solutions will give designers great satisfaction. However, in today's product development environment, it has become increasingly difficult to achieve such goals. Under the dual pressures of time and cost, many design engineers rushed to deal with the goal of simply completing the work and losing valuable creativity and insight in the panic.

Even if the environment is so severe, designers can still create creative designs and successful products by focusing on the most critical factors for solution improvement and using a variety of 3D CAD tools to improve design quality. For all product developers, the first question to consider is: “What are the key elements of a good design?” In terms of product manufacturing, there is a saying that “faster, better, cheaper, and safer”. However, in the current environment, there are some subtle differences between the requirements and the sayings in terms of improving the quality of the design. Now, designers need to consider not only the appearance, look and feel of the product design, but also its manufacturability and maintainability.

DFM <br> <br> to manufacture products more cheaply and more quickly does not necessarily make the product becomes better, then new beautifully designed, if manufacturers can not make a profit from its manufacture, the Design does not have any commercial value. Manufacturability design incorporates manufacturing operations and tool development into the conceptual design process, which is the basis for superior product design.

Let's take a look at the role of manufacturability in the development of Trek Madone road bikes recently launched at Trek Bikes (Waterloo, Wis.). The company does not use costly materials and specialized processes when manufacturing bicycle frame joints that require extremely high tolerances. Instead, Trek's manufacturing experts used SolidWorks® 3D CAD and COSMOSWorks® analysis software to develop a new composite molding method to shape these areas, eliminating a manufacturing process, reducing material usage and doubling production capacity.

Designers can also use the new 3D CAD tools to evaluate manufacturability. SolidWorks software includes DFM (manufacturability design) XpressTM, which identifies areas of the model that are complex or expensive to manufacture. Mold development and sketch analysis tools find the chamfers and features that are difficult to form in the sketch. SolidWorks Tolerance Analyst automates lamination tolerances and provides a more accurate method for solving tolerance problems. With the various types of CAD tools described above, engineers can eliminate manufacturing problems before submitting designs to the manufacturing department.

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