| Your point: With modern engineering software mechanical design is more or less automated requiring little user input. My response : Wrong. ("False" as Bernie would say) To start, I am an engineer, with a degree, and about 9 years in "one off" test model design experience. I have designed aero articles, I've designed structural articles. I've even designed things that fly beyond the speed of sound and things on fighter jets. The way your talking I suspect you've never actually done this in practice. I'll explain the process. (reading your response to me on how to do engineering design work almost make me puke) Even with today's technology we still have to sit down and review and refine automated design optimization outputs using our human minds. A lot of time its better just to do your own design because setting up such a detailed optimizer would take longer then engineering intuition will take to produce a better result. Also optimizers, however advanced, even writing your own code usually still produce stupid/unrealistic solutions. Even engineering practices that heavily rely on computer optimization still require human interaction after a design iteration to correct aspects overlooked by the optimizer. THERE IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR HUMAN DESIGN INPUT DURING ANY PRODUCT DESIGN PROCESS. At a minimum a hand calc is done to check the order of magnitude of any result before moving forward with a design. 1.Importing/creating correct geometry Have you used a laser scanner and made a parametric part from it before? Its a pain in the ass. The cloud is never perfect and you are still required to make your own interpretation of the cloud in CAD with a re-loft. And this isn't just making squares and extruding them. This is considering manufacturing resources to produce a detailed design (all properly filleted and finished model). I would hardly consider this to be done in a "negligible" amount of time. This is only considering parts with only external geometry, internal is another can of worms. An engine block has a lot of internal geometry more so and more critical than the exterior. How are you going to measure those, you can't shine light through metal. Yes there are CCM machines and Faro arms but those will only get you so far into the part you are measuring. You will have to "fudge" some of the geometry on your own. So your coolant galleys, how big do you make them? Well I don't know, the existing cast part is x", now we want to switch to AL, how thick does it need to be? Can it be the same? Have we considered all factors while creating initial geometry before analysis? This is where a guy with 15 years of engine block design comes in to play.
2 Setting Boundary conditions for design optimization
What are you telling this integrated geometry optimizer to optimize to? Do you know what all maximum load conditions and design constrains to properly design an engine block? How do you life an engine block and what are typical factors of safety are these parts design to? Without someone with experience in designing an engine block, or reading a great book on the topic you will have no idea where your starting point is and what constraints to work with in for your analysis. I have license of CATIA (Solid works is busch league CATIA FYI) sitting right in front of me. I can't just import an external point cloud into it and tell software "design me and engine block". It just doesn't work like that. Even if I refined the geometry from the point cloud into a detail parametric CAD model the optimizer will only conduct the mathematical optimization algorithm to tune USER specified variables to "maximize" a USER defined parameter. You still have to tell the software what all these are and determine their values. Again, here's where you knowledge base comes in to play yet again. All in all you design, run analysis and make refinements. Yes some of this is integrated in software at times (and is extremely expensive) but you have to have design intuition that only comes from knowing the subject matter. But please, if you are capable of doing this work with watered down versions of the software I use everyday and possibly without an engineering degree then by all means, send me your resume. I would love to hire a magical mechanical design savant that can do everything by them self (solo without peer review) with the existing tools we have been using for years with no prior knowledge of the specific project or experience. I don't know why I even typed up this response. You clearly have zero idea what your talking about. Your knowledge of proper product design is as "Backyard" as the title you define yourself with. Refering to modern cad as a holistic plug and play mechanical design suite that does everything for you is utterly retarded. Also, I will never be able to convince you otherwise because I'm just a guy on the internet you don't know with no credibility. Lets just agree to not like each other anymore.
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Work on your own car, and don't half ass it. |
