New Software Could Accelerate Product Design

From the wire: Going back to the drawing board is much easier now that researchers have developed a new type of design program called FEAsy. The program allows the designer to sketch a rough concept of the part and then analyse the part’s characteristics while it is still only a drawing, says Karthik Ramani, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University. The concept represents a departure from conventional design methods, in which engineers use a painstaking procedure called finite-element analysis to test designs, he sats.

“Ordinarily, the designer creates the component and then it has to go to other engineers who use specialised analysis software to test the design,” Ramani says. “So the analysis gets done after many parts and systems are already designed, and it’s too late to make major improvements or change design concepts at this stage.”

“The idea is to bring analysis into the sketching stage of the design process,” Ramani says.

Doctoral student Sundar Murugappan calls the new design program FEAsy, for finite element analysis made easy.

Findings were detailed in a paper presented 1 Sept. during the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Design Engineering Technical Conference in San Diego. The researchers received a 2009 Prakash Krishnaswami CAPPD Best Paper Award from the society.

More information on FEAsy is available from the Purdue news website.

Tags: Design, FEAsy, Purdue University