A manufacturability-based assessment and design modification support tool

Abstract

In the light of momentous technological development and market competitiveness, designers struggle to generate creative and successful designs to survive in the market and stay competitive. However, being in such a stressful work environment, any slip, or flaws during the design stages, particularly those related to manufacturing, can make design more vulnerable to fail. Therefore, the designer is in need of aiding means to guarantee minimizing and controlling these costly errors. Thus, this paper presents a new tool, called DesMod, to help the novice designers as well as the design students avoid such issues, as well as to save time, effort and cost. Through DesMod, the designer can assess the manufacturability of the design and receive design modification suggestions and feedback at early design stages. This can be achieved by simply importing 3D CAD models in STEP or IGES format within DesMod. Next, the design features can be recognized in a hybrid way, either automatically and/ or manually; then mapped to the corresponding database in the background. Any additional manufacturing-related information such as materials, surface quality, production volume, among others, can be also entered. Once information about the design is entered and mapped, the manufacturability assessment and the associated design modification suggestions can be generated and stored in PDF format. In this paper, the casting module of DesMod was tested with many designs ranging from simple to complex, and acceptable results were obtained.