Parametric computer-aided design (CAD lets us parametrize the way we think about a product. It allows you to draw complex shapes onscreen as if on a drawing paper and, most importantly, it allows to define relationships between the shapes.
One Giant Leap in the Industry for Product design
Early Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs used in the 1980s was mainly aimed to replace the use of paper, pencils, drawing boards, rulers and T-squares. Very simple two-dimensional CAD programs, freed design engineers from the more cumbersome and time consuming drafting process and brought about more efficient and faster ways of creating and working with engineering drawings. The earlier CAD programs were only successful in mimicking how people had always drawn. Latest Parametric CAD programs goes one step farther by capturing the more underlying meaning.
Consider an example of drawing a rectangular bar that is 60mm long and having 3 holes equally spaced at 10, 20 & 30mm distance. In traditional CAD programs, you need tocreate holes at the determined locations. But incase, if you later decide to change the bar’s length to 100mm, the holes wouldn’t expand to locations 25, 50 and 75mm. They just sit there. The traditional CAD programs don’t understand the relationship of the holes with that of the rectangular bar, they don’t understand the design intent.
The Modern Parametric CAD systems (we use Solidworks) take a different approach. Instead of positioning the holes to be at a certain distance from each other, we can instead define the relationship of holes being equally spaced. When constraints to the model are defined, you can modify the model or part and the software will recalculate everything following your rules or parameters.
Working with Complicated Mechanisms
Parametric CAD programs lets us constrain all the parts in the assembly and make it to rotate around pivots, slide along tracks, and fold and unfold virtually on the screen. With this we have the ability to check for interference and clashing throughout its entire range of motion and make sure we get it right before we do the prototype.
The Modern design
In the era of 1970s and 80s you could find the products are bxy designed, they all started out as two-dimensional line drawings. The shift in design language to curvier, more organic shapes with tightly fitting parts is very much due to invent of parametric CAD. Beautiful organic shapes can be created and easily controlled with just a few key parameters, this is the reason why today we can witness, from cars to buildings to phones to bottles tends to be a little curvier than it was 25 to 30 years ago. A classic example would be a remote control, an old remote control has complicated physical interference with its bar shaped and snugly fitted battery doors. But, due to the extensive use of parametric CAD, the shapes, fit and finish of the product is beautiful than ever.
Parametric CAD programs has so much pre-loaded information about the history of a design and the designer’s intent, there are lots of things that you can do, like calculating the product’s mass, CG position, or creating a BOM list, reverting the design to an earlier point. Thus Parametric CAD is an indispensable tool to today’s design engineer as drafting tables and compasses used to be.
Graphler Technology, one of the leading Product design companies in India, we are also into many sectors like Heavy Engineering design services, FEA Consulting services, CFD Analysis services and 3D CAD design service In India.
if you’re in an effort to hire someone to value engineer your product, we can be of help. We are a group of engineering experts working at different facets of Industrial and Product design.
