A new CAD integrated application to support designers and increase design sustainability

Abstract

The design of any industrial product requires a development process that takes time and implies costs. In order to increase the sustainability of this activity it is necessary to study and generate new methods and techniques for its optimization, supporting the designer with tools able to quickly allow him to choose the best product solution. This activity includes the implementation of tools that, by interacting with a CAD, can add further automatic operations as, for example, the optimisation of the model basing on the environment or, more generally, on the integration of some sustainable aspects by an automated process including an evaluation of the proposed product. The software SFIDA, Sailplane Fuselage Integrated Design Application, is a first attempt to implement a tool that complements CAD, collecting some of the key aspects of the design of a specific component, managing their relations and optimizing their combination; in particular, the chosen case study is the fuselage for a single-seat glider. The use of this application allows designers to save time as it offers the possibility to quickly operate on a wide set of parameters that define the target product, leading to different models among which the best one can be chosen. A further advantage is the opportunity to modify the design of the object at each step of the process without affecting the consistency of the entire model and quickly visualizing several possible solutions. The concept of SFIDA can be applied to different products and domains giving the possibility of further development and improvement. This tool can therefore be considered a significant upgrade of any CAD system used to design industrial products. In particular, this approach is suitable when the object dimension and shape can be affected by limits and constraints deriving from different features and targets, such as the spatial collocation of the component and the interaction with other elements.