By Bill Lydon - Editor
The output from Mechatronics Concept Designer can be used directly by multiple disciplines for detailed design work. Since Mechatronics Concept Designer is based on the NX CAD platform, it provides all of the mechanical design features needed for sophisticated CAD design. Mechatronics Concept Design also exports model data to many other CAD tools, including Catia, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, and the CAD-neutral JT format. Machine control application code is output in the PLCopen XML standard format.
This product closes the gap between machine design/simulation software, and controls implementation. Innovations in Product Life Cycle Management (PLM), modeling and simulation software are enabling virtual designs of machine, production lines and processes to avoid costly mistakes in actual implementation. The entire machine, including controls, can be debugged and commissioned virtually to find problems before committing to real machines and controls. This reduces the time it takes to start the manufacturing process and avoids costly rework at production startup time.
The Siemens Mechatronics Concept Designer is the first complete suite based on an open interchange standard. There are some other products that use proprietary interfaces to deliver control logic for specific controllers, but they lock the customer into one vendor.
The development process in the machine tool industry requires experts from several different disciplines, including mechanical, electrical, and software design, to develop a complex machine to the specific requirements of each individual customer. Siemens Mechatronics Concept Designer enables mechanical, electrical, and automation disciplines to work in parallel. It includes mechanical design features while enabling the user to develop a list of sensors and actuators which can be easily selected and positioned, laying the foundation for the electrical engineers to create the layout plan. More efficient software development is supported through the ability to make the machine’s sequence of operations available in a standard format common in the machinery industry.
Working in conjunction with Teamcenter, Mechatronics Concept Designer delivers an end-to-end machine design solution with an integrated systems engineering approach. At the beginning of the development cycle, designers can use Teamcenter’s requirements management and systems engineering capabilities to build a functional model that ensures customer requirements are incorporated into the design.
Since portions of the design can be made into reusable software components, users can further increase productivity with other machine designs. These components become known, validated building blocks for physical design, sensor layouts and Mechatronics for other projects.
At the introduction, Sal Spada, Research Director at ARC Advisory Group, commented, “Machine tool builders must improve development methods that span from conceptual design through detailed design.” “Specifically, development methods that facilitate conceptualization of a system early in the design process and track functional requirements with the implementation are essential to reducing time to market and ensuring that the completed system meets the customer expectations.” Spada punctuated that the use of improved development methods can make machine builders more competitive.
Mechatronics Concept Designer includes a state-of-the-art modeling and simulation capability based on NVIDIA® PhysX® technology. This physics engine, developed with the PhysX SDK from NVIDIA, is similar to the software technology used in many of today’s video games. This approach to simulation makes it easy to quickly create and interactively validate alternative design concepts. The demonstration illustrated how the user is able to interact with the digital machine model while the simulation is running, providing the ability to test the effects of different inputs in real time. The ability to model real-world physical behavior in the virtual world enables early concept verification to detect and correct errors when they are least expensive to resolve.
Mechatronics Concept Designer may well be a major milestone in the development of integrated machine design software that starts with customer requirements and ends with implementation.
It is much more efficient to have integrated design tools that can interact in a virtual environment for all the disciplines including mechanical, electrical, and software design. This approach eliminates the problems created when each design group “throws” their part of the design over the wall to the other groups. When using these traditional, isolated methods, any design issues are not resolved until the machine is built, when expensive changes are required.
In a virtual environment, there is more room for creativity to do things better by using trial and error methods. This creativity leads to more efficient and innovative machine designs.
Siemens used the NVIDIA® PhysX for the simulation engine rather than, “reinventing the wheel.” This shows a refreshing openness to leveraging technology from other sources to accomplish their goals.
The open standards such as the PLCopen XML Schema would seem to indicate that the AutomationML Digital Factory concepts are starting to get traction.
