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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Simulation software has long been associated with the design of products, but big companies are extending it to integrate with manufacturing, saving time and money. |
Aaron Lidor likes to draw his designs by hand and see them on paper. He's an engineer, not an artist, but having the ability to follow the lines with his eyes, measure with a protractor, erase, and redraw gives him a sense of personal control that can't always be achieved with a computer model. Yet, every project he starts has a budget and a timeframe, so there's little room for rework . Lidor, a mechanical design engineer at Rapiscan Systems, a maker of metal detectors and baggage screening machines used in airports, transfers his freehand drawings to Autodesk Inc.'s Inventor, a 3-D computer-aided design (CAD) application. Here, he makes a virtual prototype of the X-ray machine he's designing and can even simulate how it will be used in the real world, as bags move down a conveyer belt to be screened, for instance. In this virtual environment, Lidor can ensure that what he designs will work as a functional product. There is, however, another step that he has limited control over: how that design is moved through manufacturing. [Click to continue] |