The Hindu Business Line : <I>Behind pilot's helmet, battlebot and robotic arm... </I>

What lies beneath all these? "A carefully crafted design," says a white paper from SolidWorks. The mission of the company is "to unleash the power of 3D for everyone in product development," announces the company's site www.solidworks.com.

3D stands for `3-dimensional' - that is, "the representation of objects in a space by length, width, and height (three planes)," as a glossary on www.geek.com helps with.

"On a computer display device, 3D objects are typically represented on the 2D surface of a flat screen, but are computed as if they were actually in a three-dimensional environment. Advances in 3D technology are making gaming and other 3D environments more realistic."

A simple example of 2D, as you know, is paper or blackboard. "Not so long ago, engineers were forced to put their ideas on paper, carefully drawing out views of their new project from all directions, making precise calculations for angles and distances, and getting cramps from holding a pencil," chronicles www.cnet.com. "Then came the computer, a device that the engineers quickly discovered could take a lot of the drudgery out of the design process."

Solid modelling on a desktop

SolidWorks, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dassault Systemes S.A. based in France, "the leading global developer of product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions," came to India in 2001, and offered the promise of marrying 3D solid modelling with a desktop program's ease of use.

Over the years, it has acquired here about `400 registered commercial users and 150 customers,' such as ABB India, BPL Telecom, Delphi TVS, Makino, Tata BP Solar, BEL, NAL and GE Capital. The company has nearly 5 lakh users `at over 76,500 locations in over 100 countries around the world, representing the largest customer base of any midrange 3D CAD software vendor,' one learns from the communiqué.

The company pegs the Indian market for CAD/CAM/CAE to be in excess of Rs 250 crore, growing at a healthy 30 per cent CAGR or compounded annual growth rate. For the uninitiated, the three `three-letter `C' abbreviations' stand for computer-aided design, manufacture and engineering. SolidWorks estimates that about 2,500 to 3,000 Indian companies use CAD/CAM software.

From helmet to freezer

Among the latest press releases on the company's site are exciting things. Such as about Zygo, a customer, using a SolidWorks product to design `a lightweight, yet durable helmet-mounted display' for military pilots. "Zygo faced complex weight and assembly design challenges developing a new flight simulator display that offers better resolution, reduces pilot fatigue, and can fit any pilot's helmet (rather than forcing trainees to use a shared helmet)."

If that's heady, try this chilling stuff - from Sub-Zero Freezer Company, `the leading manufacturer of luxury residential refrigeration and wine storage units'. Using the design software, Sub-Zero could create its largest refrigerator/freezer combination, PRO 48, nearly 30 cubic feet, featuring `wall-to-wall stainless steel and integrated LED lighting throughout' and dubbed a `monument to food preservation.'

SolidWorks recently won this year's Design News Golden Mousetrap Readers' Choice Award for best community/education efforts. The company's `Student Edition' software is said to be easy to learn, "so students quickly learn 3D CAD fundamentals and hone skills, rather than spend time learning complex software." More than 10,000 institutions are teaching SolidWorks to more than a million students around the world every year, says the press release.

Towards strategic design

The world is moving beyond 3D to strategic design, alerts the company. Strategic design takes into consideration `alternates and comparative changes that may be required'. A bunch of examples of such design meets the eye in a different white paper from the company, titled `Why Use Analysis Up-Front in the Design Cycle?'

Analysis is only beneficial if it delivers meaningful results, avers the paper. "In some circumstances, the real-world operating conditions of the design are so extreme that you have to rely upon virtual analysis to determine whether the design can survive the stresses or not."

Take for example, `the front arm of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Mars Exploration Rover (MER)' - a robotic design task that Alliance Spacesystems Inc. (ASI) undertook. "The MER's robotic arm measures four feet in length, has five degrees of freedom, and carries a variety of scientific instrumentation at the end. Despite its complexity, the arm weighs only 7.7 lbs because... mass is the most critical part of any space mission." ASI could take 15-20 per cent of mass out, using some of the optimisation features in the SolidWorks' analysis tool called `Cosmos', one learns. "That doesn't sound like much, but if you wanted to reduce your car 20 per cent you'd have to take the whole engine and transmission and throw it out," reads a quote cited in the paper.

Top-down approach

Preceding the robotic arm of MER, the paper speaks about a high school student who recently used CAE software and Cosmos design analysis to design a BattleBot for tournament use. Moral: "Even inexperienced users can learn how to use these systems effectively." One other example in the paper is about the use of software in designing experimental aircraft.

The "more an engineer can learn about the likely behaviour of the most heavily stressed parts of his design, the more likely he is to design a good-performing product in the least possible amount of time. And time often proves to be the crux and greatest justification for using design analysis early and frequently in the design process," explains the paper. Call it `top-down', but it works this way: "The highest-stressed component becomes the project driver, and if you follow the load path through adjacent components and they become progressively less difficult, you - the designer - need to spend less time on them."

Design analysis with the help of IT may well be a topic that is worth spending more time on.

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