DEVELOP3D - Technology for the product lifecycle

Football from the 1950s: not exactly round

As a fan of the beautiful game, it makes me feel a bit sick to use the word ‘soccer’ in the headline. The thing is I don’t want to confuse our American readers as this whole post is about how perfectly round a football is, and American footballs aren’t, er, exactly round. Now having probably insulted our friends from over the pond, I’ll get on with the story.

Application Engineers at Phase Vision have used their latest scanning technology to scan several footballs to see how round they are –  three match quality balls from Nike, Umbro and the current Adidas Jabulani World Cup ball – plus a cheap replica of the world cup ball, and a 1950s match ball – the type some of us remember from our childhood that literally took your head off when it got wet.

Adidas Jabulani World Cup ball: perfectly round

According to Phase Vision, FIFA regulations specify that a ball must be measured using 16 points, but that masks the true sphericity (or otherwise) of the ball. The use of only 16 measurement points was dictated by mechanical measurement approaches (using a contact arm or co-ordinate measuring machine) which were slow, and which distorted the ball during measurements.

So just how round were the balls? Only three of the balls scanned passed FIFA’s geometry tests for sphericity and size – the three world cup balls, including the replica ball.

Here’s the full story. It makes for an interesting read for fans of football, soccer and even those who made an art out of forging sick notes at school.

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Composites design is something that’s coming up a lot during my meetings with vendors. Only the other week I was looking at some simulation tools for simulation crack propagation across composite, multi-layered materials (that would be with the delightful chaps from Simulia when looking at Abaqus 6.10) as well as the composite design related tools in NX 7.5 from Siemens. Why the sudden concentration on composites? Facts are that these material types are becoming more and more commonplace outside of their traditional usage in Automotive. Only just this week the world’s first plastic plane (the Boeing 787) has landed on british soil for the first time at the Farnborough Airshow. Ok ok, it’s 50% carbon fibre but who can resist an overused cliche eh?.

Lamborghini’s new Composites centre brings a new level of expertise in an rapidly expanding field

Then an intriguing little press release popped into my inbox. It turns out that Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A has just opened a new Advanced Composites Research Center (ACRC) at its headquarters in Sant’Agata Bolognese, where the team will carry out research on innovative design and production methods for carbon-fibre elements. This has been built alongside development of an proprietary all-new, highly efficient production process for extremely complex carbon-fibre structures which has been “secured through an array of patents and constitutes a breakthrough into the next generation of carbon-fibre components.”

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The team from the University of Padova, Italy, push its car down to the judges

As the workers still clear away the stands and hospitality marquees from the previous weekend’s British Grand Prix, teams of students from across the world descended into the famous Silverstone pitlane for the annual Formula Student event.

Despite struggling through the blustery conditions, temperamental rain showers, and the fact that most of the teams had been up most of the night still finishing adjustments to their cars, the cheery bunch all seemed to be looking forward to getting their creations onto the hallowed track following a year of design and engineering.

Most of the British entrants are final year students, in some cases graduating days before the event, proudly displaying their final projects and getting the chance to work from the pitlanes still marked with F1 team liveries, logos and even tyre marks.

All the cars were modeled in 3D CAD, with some more comprehensively than others. With many of the teams made of pure automotive and motorsport degree classes, their proficiency for strength testing, FEA analysis, and component design in CAD was pretty impressive.

The team from Delft University, Holland, show off their finished car, and its Catia model

Most teams seemed to have worked with Catia for the chassis, although others modeled the full thing in SolidWorks, while a sparse few were using sponsor Autodesk’s Inventor, or the really professional were really going for it in Pro/Engineer. It was interesting to see that even between the teams with the greater budgets (a lot of the European universities spend a full year traveling to the various international versions and racing) and those without, a lot of the emphasis for modern track-car building was put on the initial 3D CAD model.

Some F1 heavyweights were on hand to offer advice and add to the pressure

And it wasn’t just students at the opening day; on hand were some big guns from the world of F1 racing. Renault F1 managing director Bob Bell; Mercedes (and Michael Schumacer’s personal) race engineer Andrew Shovlin; Virgin Racing technical director Nick Wirth; and even square-jawed, taller-than-you-expect, former-F1 driver David Coulthard were all on site to give a motivational talk, some pearls of wisdom, and kick some tyres in the garages.

With over 2,500 students taking part, and the majority wanting to progress into the automotive and motorsport industry, there was some serious competition to be had even before the cars take to the track for individual time trials, handling and breaking tests over the next three days.

www.formulastudent.com

It’s been a couple of weeks since I got back from Texas and the PLM Connection event held at the beginning of last month - but I’ve got a few thoughts and whatnot to share from the event. This was the first time that the press has been invited to the event and I was curious to find out what it was like, what the feeling was amongst the users in attendance and of course, to catch up with the folks at Siemens.

PLM Connections is organised by the user group committee, many of whom I got to meet on the first day. It’s clear that this is a user focussed event and the attendance and subject discussed reflects that. There’s often a difference between user events organised by the users (or a group of them), such as this and PTC’s PTC/User events and those organised by the software vendor (think SolidWorks World). It’s quite difficult to put a finger on the different between the two, but there’s something. Whatever it is, both types are focussed on three things: Learning, Updating and Networking.

The learning is satisfied by just under 400 technical sessions that reach across the entire Siemens portfolio - while the event began as an NX (or Unigraphics) focussed event, it now brings together those users with those from the Teamcenter, Tecnomatix and Solid Edge communities. What I found interesting, speaking to a number of both the organisational committee and the users in general, is that they’re typically there for an update on several items from that list - predominately NX and Teamcenter, but the others get a good look into the mix.

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A couple of weeks back Autodesk named West Hills Construction (WHC) - a California–based contracting firm with an energy division that integrates energy management solutions into commercial, industrial and manufacturing facilities - as its Inventor of the Month. I caught up with Rusty Wood, vice president of WHC’s Energy Division, to ask him some questions about this achievement. First up, how does it feel? “It is a wonderful honour to be named Autodesk Inventor of the Month. We just saw a great tool that we could use in our industry and figured out how to make it work for us. It has paid itself back ten times over,” he says.

The types of companies that approach WHC are those that want to reduce the energy use of their facility and at the same time save money. After carrying out an Investment Grade Audit to determine what the needs of the facility are, WHC recommend a combination of different technologies including photovoltaic arrays, wind turbines and energy storage devices that interact with a facility to save the client money. “The name of the game is offsetting their energy bills over 20 year project life spans,” explains Wood.

For instance, WHC was recently contracted to design an energy management system using photovoltaic arrays for a 37-foot-tall, 86 000 square foot building that desired onsite energy generation. WHC used Autodesk software throughout the design and construction of this massive energy management system. “We use Autodesk from the very start of a job in a 2D format to get a rough idea of what we wish to design. Once we have a solid 2D design in either the standard Autodesk program (Electrical 2011, Mechanical 2011) we’ll push the 2D design over to Inventor, 3DMax or Maya to start the 3D process. Once we have completed our model in Inventor, we either take the model and push it to Showcase 3DMax, or Maya to put the finishing touches on the 3D renderings for our sales and bid presentations,” says Wood.

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The world of 3D design technology is an odd one sometimes, particularly in today’s web-connected world, where users are able to connect, discuss and and in some cases, whinge a bit, unlike ever before. As ever with such things, there are those that engage. There are those that make a lot of noise and seem to thrive from complaint or stirring up a fuss. There are those that are passive in their consumption of all the information out there. Then there are those that actually create something that benefits a whole community.

Personally, I’m more interested in the first and the last . A perfect example of latter, those that get off their arses and do something, came to my attention recently on twitter. Brian Hall (@QubeIt), who released a handy little add-on for Autodesk’s Inventor application that adds a couple of functions to Inventor’s rectangle sketching tools - with centre point-based creation methods at its core.

Now, the reason this caught my attention was that only the previous weekend, I’d been doing some modelling work on a little product I’ve been kicking about with for a while and came up against this exact problem. Inventor doesn’t allow you to create a rectangle from a centre point, in fact, it requires a couple more operations to create exactly that. So, Brian’s add-in came just at the right time. And it works, rather delightfully I might add.

I’d been a little frustrated with Inventor’s lack of this option (other systems have it), but what had I done about it? The answer is of course, bugger all.

As I thought about this difference, I was curious to find out why Brian hadn’t followed my passive path and become more active and actually done something to solve that frustration, not only for himself, but also anyone else (the add-in is free) - so caught up with Brian and asked a few questions.

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News just in from Dassault and it’s fascinating. It revolves around Dassault announcing that EskoArtwork (formerly known as EskoGraphics I think) has joined the joined the DS Software Community Program. For those that aren’t familiar with the company, it describes itself as a global supplier and integrator of innovative solutions for packaging, commercial printing and professional publishing. To put it another way, Esko is a company that has, for many years, specialised in supporting the packaging design industry - providing a range of tools that cover everything from signage and point of sales, through to all manner of packaging, covering both its design and its production.According to the release:

Dassault Systemes’ Enovia V6 CPG Accelerator will be integrated with EskoArtwork’s Dynamic Content module for Adobe Illustrator, enabling users to edit and maintain label copy outside of Illustrator.  By joining these two solutions, users can now create a single version of the truth, helping them to collaboratively manage all aspects of a label, from language and artwork copy management through to mapping and compliance.  Users can auto populate  and publish label content directly to Adobe Illustrator, slashing the time required for artwork creation from months down to as little as a day. Companies will also be able to manage brand artwork on a global basis, providing greater flexibility for regional & local changes to be incorporated more efficiently.

The Dynamic Content module is fairly basic in terms of technology, but potentially revolutionary when you look at the Consumer Packaging industry. What it allows is the separation of the Design from the Text within those Designs. Basically, you define the text for the packaging separately, using a form-based approach. This is then intelligently linked (via an XML file) to Adobe Illustrator to provide the text for specific areas of an item’s packaging. When you consider that much of the text is common across many company’s packaging scheme, often in multiple languages, the benefits for reuse are huge.

Consider this: A shampoo range. Multiple container sizes, for argument’s sake, let’s say there are four sizes (Travel, Small, Medium and Bulk). Those sizes are then made available across the globe, requiring the same text in 12 languages and some with regional variation. Now, initially generating the text for each label, in each size, in each language is going to be problematic. Making a change is going to be even more so, then you’ve got the sign-off and approval process to go through too.

Using a system like this you would make changes to a single XML file and the rest would propagate out.By integrating that into a data and version management system such as Enovia, makes perfect sense. Changes are tracked, the labels can be visualised and managed through an approval process - it’s worth noting that there’s also work in this agreement pertaining to integration of Enovia with EskoArtwork’s web-based proofing tool, Web Center Viewer. And of course, if you’re mixing labelling and artwork design with 3D-based structural packaging design (for containers, bottles, boxes etc), then having everything managed and accessible to a pretty diverse team, then you’re onto a winner.