Industrial Design and Virtual Prototyping
Our experience working with fall protection across a wide range of industries, as well as adventure sports and theatrical rigging, means we have a rather unique insight into the design of new devices and the possible improvements to existing products. We work closely with our customers to redesign and virtually-prototype new ideas and devices of all sizes, from pulley bearings to training centers. This delivers a number of advantages:
- Cost savings for R&D and tooling
- Data can be included in standards technical files
- Faster time to market
- Earlier documentation and renders for focus group feedback
Company designers can find their previous products and management opinions drive the design rather than a true appreciation of what the market wants and what the technology can deliver. We bring fresh eyes to the problem, along with an unbiased view of what customers are looking for.
Flexible and secure solutions
We use the latest CAD/CAM and digital prototyping software, and can work with native files in all the industry-standard formats. Our powerful rendering tools combined with Adobe Acrobat X allow us to create photo-quality images and secure interactive 3D documents for distribution of sensitive designs, including shrink-wrap reduction and DRM. Using these techniques, customer feedback can be collected early in the design process where changes are most cost-effective to apply.
We can use files from:
- Autodesk Inventor 2011
- Autodesk AutoCAD 2011
- Autodesk 3DS Max 2010
We can import native B-rep and tesselated files in OBJ, STEP, IGES, DWG/DXF, DAE, PRC, etc. and can arrange reverse-documentation to convert a physical sample back into a computer model.
Partnerships in confidence
Naturally our work is bespoke and remains strictly confidential, so to discuss the services we can provide for your existing products or new concepts, please contact us.
We work under NDA and can interface with your own engineering teams and version control systems. If you simply need a render from an existing CAD model, or some ideas about the technology available on the horizon that we think will become important, we're happy to help.
What is Virtual Prototyping?
Almost everything is designed on a computer these days, and Computer Aided Design (CAD) software can define the most complex of shapes, and automatically export instructions to Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machining stations to manufacture the shape perfectly. However when you're dealing with safety-critical components the shape is not the only issue - how the part performs depends on the material properties, what assembly it fits within, and what real-world loads are applied. With components in personal devices such as descenders, the goal is a compromise between safety and the smallest, lightest and cheapest components - the margin is often small, so mistakes can cost lives.
Conventional prototyping will take the CAD design, and make several physical prototypes on which destructive tests can be run - tensile loads, cycle tests, stress analyses and so forth. The model is refined based on the test results, another prototype made, and so on until it works. Even with a 'simple' object like a karabiner, this is a massively-expensive process that requires a major investment in test equipment.
Virtual (or digital) prototyping does all the hard work within the computer model, so there's no need to make a physical copy until the end of the design process. Material specifications are defined into the software, and highly-accurate analyses run to predict strengths, flexibility and fatigue across one part or an entire assembly. The design can be automatically optimized; using the simulation results to drive design parameters, dimensions and material selections; and re-tested much faster than real-time, hence saving cost and dramatically reducing the time to market.
The second major advantage to working digitally is in producing images (renders) of the model, for example so that your marketing team can get to work on the promotional literature long before the products are rolling out the factory door. 2D, 3D and video clip renders are simple to create in a range of styles, showing assembly processes, demonstrating wear patterns for inspection, and so forth.
