&lt;p&gt;A Case Study in CAD Design Automation&lt;/p&gt;

Andrew G Lowe,Nathan W Hartman

doi:10.21061/jots.v37i1.a.1

Abstract

Computer-aided design (CAD) software and other product life-cycle management (PLM) tools have become ubiquitous in industry during the past 20 years. Over this time they have continuously evolved, becoming programs with enormous capabilities, but the companies that use them have not evolved their design practices at the same rate. Due to the constant pressure of bringing new products to market, commercial businesses are not able to dedicate the resources necessary to tap into the more advanced capabilities of their design tools that have the potential to significantly reduce both time-to-market and quality of their products. Taking advantage of these advanced capabilities would require little time and out-of-pocket expense, since the companies already own the licenses to the software. This article details the work of a small research team working in conjunction with a major turbine engine manufacturer endeavoring to make better use of the underutilized capabilities of their design software. By using the scripting language built into their CAD package for design automation, knowledge-based engineering applications, and efficient movement of data between design packages, the company was able to significantly reduce design time for turbine design, increase the number of feasible design iterations, increase benefits from relational modeling techniques, and increase the overall quality of their design processes.

Highlights

Computer-aided design (CAD) software and other product life-cycle management (PLM) tools have become ubiquitous in industry during the past 20 years
Geometric data are often reengineered and recreated within the CAD system. This process ranges from hours to days because the current methods of creating the airfoil models in the CAD system are not parametric
A turbine engine can contain as many as of 20 different airfoils, so any improvement in the time for one design iteration will have a beneficial effect on the total design process

Summary

Program Capabilities

The automated turbine design application was developed in stages by a series of small research teams and individuals, each building. Initial requirements were for a KF applicaupon the work of the previous researchers and tion capable of reading the raw point cloud data adding features as each stage was determined to provided by the aero engineers and automatically be robust enough for production. If the application proved robust in generating the initial airfoil solid, additional capability would be added to the application allowing for automation of additional features, including framework for internal cooling geometry, representations of thermal coatings, and NX-specific settings to conform to company design policy and to make the final modeler's job easier. When the initial solid model is generated, the operation loops through the list, drawing a spline is repeated with the added specification that the through each array of section points.

Trailing Edge

Efficient Analysis Integration engineered data in tandem with robust relational