Parametric Engineering Design Tools and Applications

Abstract

Abstract Recent collaborations with graduate students in Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University and industry, such as United Technologies (OTIS and Pratt & Whitney) and Honeywell (AlliedSignal) have resulted in significant advancements to the interactive and programmatic parametric design methodologies. This paper presents the basics of interactive parametric CAD design as a point-of-departure for our discussion of the programmatic approach. Further it will discuss the advantages and problems of using a programmatic parametric design approach to reduce design cycle time. This programmatic parametric approach involves the combination of vendor provided interactive CAD parametrics and native CAD toolkit development and customization. Finally it will focus on the advantages and drawbacks of this schema by using joint educational/ industrial examples. These advantages include improvements in the design/analysis/ manufacture process as well as in the overall communication between different engineering load centers. The time and resource commitment to custom CAD development has haunted industry for decades. However, through new techniques and interfaces being explored and developed at BYU we propose a new graphical user interface for custom programming of CAD. This paper discusses the advantages that such an interface would have in reducing programming time and allowing the program to interoperate between multiple CAD packages with varying graphic kernels.