Comment: Changing times – the trends that are shaping CAD

In the age of digital transformation, the design process is going to be met with new data challenges.

The digital thread serves as a strategic solution, linking digital product development, manufacturing, and service data streams together. The responsibility for integrating this transformative trend into the design process falls with the design team.

This tasks the design engineer with exploring how to leverage disruptive technologies, like additive manufacturing and augmented reality (AR), effectively to meet the evolving needs of their companies.

Moreover, the design engineer shares a significant responsibility in assisting companies in achieving sustainability goals.

The seamless integration of CAD tools into the design environment helps engineers effortlessly optimise sustainability. Through the strategic use of capabilities, such as simulation and generative design, engineers can assess how material choices impact product performance, thereby contributing to the reduction of excess waste and energy consumption.

The central themes become apparent, but how does the context of product development and engineering work shift, and how can design teams adapt?

Driving the digital thread through the design process

The design engineer serves as a key player in a company’s digital thread strategy and bears the responsibility of staying connected, but also playing integrating innovative technologies including augmented reality (AR) and additive manufacturing.

Embracing the latter, design engineers employ cutting-edge techniques to create intricate and optimised designs that leverage the unique capabilities of 3D printing. This approach facilitates rapid prototyping and enables the creation of complex geometries and lattice structures otherwise unattainable through traditional methods.

With Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) integrated into the design tool, design engineers avoid the tedious process of context switching when combining traditionally manufactured parts with 3D printed parts.  

At the same time, the integration of AR introduces a new dimension to collaboration. Design engineers use augmented reality to examine, share and ultimately collaborate on virtual prototypes, allowing real-time interaction and rapid design iterations.

As companies strive to get to market faster with more innovative, high-quality products, the interruption of transitioning from core CAD design tasks to complementary processes like manufacturing preparation or finite element analysis wastes precious time.

This practice creates opportunities for error, with different copies of models being simultaneously used in different contexts. Alternatively, the entire organisation needs to unite in acknowledging that these tasks can be executed far more efficiently on the native CAD file within the CAD environment.

Committing to this integrated approach is an organisational change management (OCM) challenge.

Designing for Sustainability

The design engineer is responsible for making critical decisions that impact a product’s environmental footprint and this is why leveraging mature and integrated CAD capabilities is so important.

Sustainable product design goes beyond understanding the impact of material choices on a product’s carbon footprint. Design engineers can harness powerful resources, such as finite element analysis, generative design, and parameter-based optimisation capabilities in today’s modern CAD environments, to take sustainable design simply beyond material choices.

Furthermore, when the design team spans geographies and requires input from a wide range of experts, a highly collaborative design environment delivers critical efficiency to the design process.

This way, engineering experts from across the organisation can improve the product’s environmental impact by optimising energy consumption, emissions, and material use of different design choices.

Expanding the use of the design tool to use more fully integrated capabilities requires training and process change. Design engineers need to first learn how to best apply integrated simulation, manufacturing, generative design, and additive manufacturing capabilities, in order to drive the most efficient and effective design process. 

What about applied AI?

One way in which we see applied artificial intelligence (AI) integrated into the design world is through generative design technology.

The iterative nature of generative design allows for the rapid generation and evaluation of numerous design alternatives, resulting in a more collaborative design process. Integrating it into engineering workflows also allows for the exploration of a vast array of potential design options without breaking the digital thread.

Through generative design, the digital thread is supplied with a continuous flow of design iterations and insights, establishing a comprehensive, interconnected understanding of the product’s evolution.

Because the applied AI algorithms in generative design tools can prioritise resource efficiency, weight reduction, and other environmental factors considered during the design process, these tools can propose innovative solutions that align with company sustainability goals. .

Applied AI could also be leveraged to improve CAD user experience by analysing user tendencies, both positive and negative, and helping them to improve. For example, the system can recognise the user applying a familiar design pattern (like the same set of CAD features in succession) across various designs and locations. The system could then intelligently suggest collecting and applying these patterns automatically, streamlining the user’s workflow.

Responsibility

In a world where macro-economic factors create uncertainty, the responsibility of examining and improving the product development cycle lies with the design team.

Using innovative design technology - integrated into the CAD environment - allows the design engineer to maintain the digital thread while driving designs to meet overarching company sustainability goals.

In 2024, as the digital thread intersects with sustainability initiatives, the design engineer is met with the reality that the context of their world is changing. And they need to adapt, fast.

Brian Thompson, CAD Division general manager at PTC