Manufacturing Toolbox

Its here! Its here! - Autodesk Inventor Fusion for Mac

Ever since seeing it at AU2011 back in December, I/We/All of us have been waiting for Autodesk Inventor Fusion for Mac to be available. Today, I feel like Navin R. Johnson...Fusion for Mac is here! Fusion for Mac is here! 

First off, I am not 'Mr. Mac' by any means. I have a MacBook Pro...but, primarily run Windows7 via Boot Camp. Inventor Fusion for Mac is going to change my OSX usage for sure. I will take a few minutes to walk you through my delight(s) as I started using Fusion for Mac.

Right upon launching IFM (just made that acronym up...way easier to type than Inventor Fusion for Mac) you are asked to log into (or create) your Autodesk ID, then you see this welcome screen.

Despite my natural instincts, I did watch a couple of the 'Essential Skill Videos'...well worth the time. The other things I noticed right away was the direct links to Autodesk Exchange and Autodesk 360 (interesting huh?). With the Welcome Screen out of the way, I wanted to get a feel for all the functions, features and options I would be able to get my hands on with this release. To save you some time, here is an image with most of it laid out for you.

Lets do a quick review: Solids, Surfaces, Visualization, Parts and Assemblies...and, do you see the 360 integration? In case you missed it 'Insert from Autodesk 360' was on the Assemble menu.  This is good stuff here folks...good stuff indeed. And here is some more Autodesk 360 you will see in IFM.

All of the standard Inventor/Fusion interactions are there (or should I now call it Inventor Fusion for Windows, IFW for short). Middle mouse pans, SHIFT+Middle rotates, etc. Heads up UI and dynamic previews are agile and rockin'

Umm...but, there is some interaction that is different. And by 'different' I really mean 'f$#&ing cool'. Great example; when you are assembling components together, you just wiggle your cursor a bit around some geometry and it highlights it for selection and then animates when the assemble is OK'ed.

 

 

There are a few other subtle differences as well. The import file options are a bit different, and IFM has a new file extension.

And you have the ability to save directly to 360. Hello collaboritive design, am I right?

Throughout my 'test run' I opened some SAT, STP, Inventor (ipt & iam) and some old Fusion DWGs. All the files opened fine, and I even mixed them up into a crazy multi-CAD assembly (not that any of us work with multiple file formats...crazy, I know). Inventor Fusion for Mac is a feature rich and powerful design software...and pretty fun to use to boot. 

I did want to give one quick disclaimer: I did have spiky hair, was wearing my Warby Parker glasses, and had grown a 3-day beard when performing this 'test run'...I wasn't sure if it was a Mac requirement or not.

Go over to Autodesk Labs and try Autodesk Inventor Fusion for Mac for yourself...I double checked the system requirements, the beard is optional.

-lw

Autodesk 360 - This cloud has a silver lining or two...or 25

In typcial Autodesk fashion, we renamed Autodesk Cloud to Autodesk 360. But, also in typical Autodesk fashion, we made it better than before.

 

Here are the key things to know about Autodesk 360:

• We give 3GB of storage space to anyone for free. This can be used for online collaboration, viewing, rendering, editing DWGs...or just simply storage of any file type (take that dropbox)
• If you are an Autodesk Subscription customer (first off, thank you) you get 25GB of storage, 100 Rendering units, Inventor Simulation Optimization, Energy Analysis for Revit, Green Building Studio, Structural Analysis for Revit and some Buzzsaw too.

 

 

 

To get started, go to http://360.autodesk.com and sign up for a 360 account, or if you are a subscription customer, sign in with your Autodesk ID.

Once in, you can easily begin taking advantage of your 360 account. For this post, I am just going to focus on what anyone with the free access can do (because, honestly, that is all I get as an Autodesk employee by default). Right off the bat, you can quickly and easily see any and all activity related to your 360 files. Users can easily filter by date, activity type and collaborators.

To add files, you simply select the documents link on the top of the page and then drag and drop your files into 360 (or select the upload icon if you like that sort of thing). Either way, collaborators can be specified and a basic type of user rights can be applied to a file or folder.

With your files added into your 360 documents, you can begin to decide if you want to share your document. If you share it, you can decide what permissions you are giving to those you are collaborating with. All by right-clicking directly on the file in 360 (really you are clicking in your internet browser...Google Chrome is my poison of choice). Here you can see, I have a plethora of options for interacting with the file.

...and once you choose what you want to do with the file, you can decide how your fellow collaborators can interact with the file.

Let the collaboration and file sharing begin! And this is just the tip of the iceberg with Autodesk 360. Autodesk 360 provides...

Features

Access to files via Mobile Apps

Services

and Cloud Enabled Products

 

...here at Autodesk we change product names from time to time. But, it is certainly more than a name change, I guess you could say it is like Bob Dylan said, things have changed.

 

-lw

Eco Materials Adviser Blog Series - Assessing Environment Impact

In last week’s post I started discussing some of the key principles of environmentally sustainable design and concluded that to select a ‘sustainable material’ we first need to understand the application and to identify which phase of the product life cycle is contributing most to the overall environmental impact. This week I’d like to look at some of the different approaches to environmental assessment and the key considerations when thinking about how to integrate these tools into the product development process.

Once an organisation has decided that delivering more environmentally sustainable products will deliver business benefits it often falls on the design and engineering function to make it so. But things are not that simple. There are many issues that need to be considered when attempting to integrate sustainable design into your product development activities, such as:

• What are the metrics and targets?
• Which environmental impact categories are we (and our customers/stakeholders) interested in?
• Who is responsible for meeting these targets?
• Where can we get help and support?
• At what stage in the product development process should I begin considering sustainable design?
• How will we track progress during the product development process?
• How does this fit with our environmental management activities?
• Which product ranges are affected?
• Should we communicate what we are doing to our customers?
• Do we want to certify against a standard or eco label?

 

The answer to these questions will generally vary from company to company and will depend on the type of products you sell, the markets you operate in, your company strategy etc. However, when it comes to the question, “At what stage in the product development process should I begin considering sustainable design?” there is only one answer: right from the start.

There are three very good reasons for beginning to address sustainable design issues early in the product development process:

1. It is widely claimed that up to 80% of a product’s environmental impacts are determined during the early stages of design – so if you want to make big improvements to the sustainability performance of your product you have to make those changes early.
2. It is during early design that material and process choices are being made which are key design levers for reducing environmental impacts.
3. Changes to the design of a product become more costly and more likely to increase lead time the later they come in the product development process.

 

For these reasons it is crucial to that you integrate sustainable design into the early stages of your product development process.

I mentioned last week that to make sustainable material choices you need to understand which phase of the product life cycle is contributing most to the overall environmental impact of a product. This requires you to perform some kind of environmental assessment of the product. There aren’t many tools out there that support product environmental assessment during the early stages of the product development process. Most environmental assessment tools have come out of the academic field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Whilst these tools help LCA experts to perform very detailed assessments of products they are not really suitable for designers and engineers as they require too much detailed information about where the product will be made, what machinery will be used, how it will be transported and so on. Most of this information isn’t available in the early stages of product development and so LCA tools can only be applied at the end of the design process – when it is too late and too costly to use the results to inform the design of the product. A secondary barrier to using conventional LCA tools is that they were generally developed for use by LCA experts, which means that the terminology and complexity of the tool often leaves designers feeling a bit bewildered.

It was recognition of these problems with conventional environmental assessment tools that led Granta and Autodesk to team up to produce the Eco Materials Adviser in Autodesk Inventor. Early on in the partnership we drew up a list of high-level requirements for an environmental assessment tool for use by designers in the early stages of product development. Those requirements are listed below.

We’ve kept these requirements in mind throughout the development of the product and we are continuously refining this list as we receive feedback from designers and engineers that are using the tool to deliver more environmentally sustainable products. I’d love to hear your comments on this list as well and if you have Inventor 2012 then you already have the Base Version Eco Materials Adviser and can start using it today to see how well we’ve done so far in delivering against this list. Please post your comments below or you can contact me via the Eco Materials Adviser website.

 

Eco Materials Adviser Blog Series - What is a sustainable material?

So in my previous post I was talking about why designers and companies need to be thinking about environmentally sustainable design but now lets get stuck into the detail by thinking about ‘what is a sustainable material?’

 

When companies begin to think about sustainable design, one of the first issues they often look into are the materials they use. This is a good starting point as materials choices determine to a large extent the environmental impacts of a product across its lifecycle. Materials choices can also be a powerful lever for reducing environmental impacts. But to select materials to reduce environmental impacts we first need to overcome a major misconception. That misconception is that in order to produce a more environmentally sustainable product we always need to use ‘green’ materials. When I say ‘green’ materials I’m thinking of natural materials such as bamboo, bio-polymers, or recycled and recyclable materials.

 

Now it’s true that to produce 1kg of these green materials often requires less energy and results in lower carbon emissions than producing 1kg of some other conventional engineering material – see the table below for a comparison of the environmental aspects of pine wood and carbon fibre reinforced composite. But we also have to consider our specific application in order to minimise the overall environmental impacts of the product, as well as thinking about the additional requirements we have for the material beyond environmental performance.

To demonstrate this point lets consider the two materials in the table above and two applications from quite different areas of design. If we just look at the data in the table, the carbon fibre composite seems to be bad guy here. But if the application we are considering for t his material is a structural component of an aircraft then the reduction in mass and fuel burn which can be achieved through the use of composites more than makes up for the high material production impacts. For instance, Boeing claims that by using composite materials in up to 50% of the primary structures of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the plane will use 20% less fuel than similar sized planes.

 

Conversely, if the application is a humble toilet seat then using carbon fibre composites has no environmental benefit and so it would be better to stick with the more conventional pine wood material which requires less energy to produce. Just to confuse matters, if we were considering a toilet in an aircraft, then we should probably go with the composite option to reduce mass and the associated fuel burn.

What these examples hopefully show is that we can only begin to make material selections choices for environmental performance once we have a good understanding of the specific application. The other more subtle point is that the type of sustainable design strategy we need to apply depends on which phase of the product lifecycle is contributing most to the overall environmental impact of the product. So in the aircraft structure example, the use phase dominates and so we aim to select materials that reduce the mass of the product and the associated fuel burn. For the toilet seat, the material production phase dominates and so we need to select materials that have a low embodied energy or contain recycled material in order to reduce the impacts of that phase. So there are occasions when selecting a ‘green’ material is a good idea but there are many occasions when a material which looks to have high environmental impacts turns out to be the best choice over the lifecycle of the product – it all depends on the application and which phase of the lifecycle is causing the problem.

 

For a video talking through these points in more detail take a look at the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop. In my next post I’ll be following up on these points by discussing a bit more about how we can quantify the environmental impacts of a product across in order to identify the dominant phase of the lifecycle and the different tools and approaches that can be used to do this.

Eco Materials Adviser Blog Series - Business case for sustainable design

In these blogs I will be writing about sustainable design, but before we get into the details of how to do sustainable design, let’s first think about why its an important issue for you and your organisation.

Manufacturing companies around the world are facing an uphill battle at the moment as Western economies drag themselves out of recession. Within this context, finding the time and design resource to consider sustainability issues as part of a product development project can seem difficult. Nonetheless, there are three very good business case arguments why you and your company should be applying sustainable principles and tools in your design activities.

 

1.     To reduce costs

Companies often find that trying to lower the environmental impacts of their products also leads to lower manufacturing costs, through the reduction of materials, energy and waste. For designers, thinking about sustainability issues can offer a new and fresh perspective on the products they develop – helping them to spot opportunities for waste and cost reduction. This case study from Smiths Detection is a good example of this. When redesigning and existing product with sustainable design principles in mind they were able to save nearly $160,000 per year in manufacturing costs.

In some cases the major cost saving achieved through sustainable design is for your customer rather direct costs saving for you as the manufacturer. If this is the case, you need to think about how to communicate this to the customer. The Dyson Airblade™ is an innovative hand drier which you might see the next time you’re in a busy washroom in an office, airport or museums. Dyson claim that the Airblade™ is quicker, more energy efficient and cheaper than its competitors. To bring home the point Dyson have provided a cost savings calculator where you can quickly estimate how much you could save by switching to the Airblade™. 

  

1.     To reduce risks

Ernst & Young have previously highlighted regulation and compliance as the number one risk faced by businesses. Sustainable design provides a route for manufacturers to manage the risks associated with important issues such as environmental legislation, materials and energy security, and corporate social responsibility. For instance, we now have legislation and standards across the US, Europe and elsewhere on issues such as the energy consumption of products, the hazardous substances they may contain, batteries, the product’s carbon footprint, and how they are disposed of at the end of their life. Failing to comply with these legislations will generally mean that the product will be removed from the relevant markets and may involve significant fines. 

 

Applying sustainable design principles and tools can enable you to mitigate the risk of non-compliance by helping you to think about issues like energy, carbon and hazardous substances during the early stages of design. Ideally sustainable design principles and tools should be backed-up by some kind of management system. If your organisation has adopted the ISO 14001 environmental management system you may want to have a look at the recently-published guidance standard, ISO 14006, which explains how sustainable design can fit into this.

1.      To increase sales

There are many companies who are successfully winning market share and retaining existing customers by promoting the environmental credentials of their products. Philips is one company in particular that has a long track record in this area. They have six ‘focal areas’ of environmental product performance which they benchmark their products on. Products that out perform their nearest competitor by at least 10% in any one of these areas, whilst still having a better overall impact, are labelled as a ‘Green Flagship’ product. Sales of these more environmentally sustainable products now account for nearly $12 billion for Philips – that 39% of their total sales. So clearly, ‘green’ products are no longer the overly-expensive, niche products they once were and can help to drive significant growth in sales.

One note of caution, if you do want to make claims about the environmental performance of your product, make sure you do so in an honest and transparent manner by following these guidelines, or by certifying against a respected eco label such as EPEAT, LEED or Energy Star in the US or a similar equivalent in your region.

Here I’ve provided some general arguments for why sustainable design is an important issue for you and your organisation. If you would like to gain support for sustainable design in your organisation, the next step is to think about exactly what would be the business case argument for sustainable design for your organisation, the types of products you make and the markets you sell into. Hopefully the examples and information I’ve provided will offer some inspiration for this – good luck!

If you’d like to find out more about building the business case for sustainable design and how to apply the Eoc Materials Adviser tool in your work, then please register for this free webinar on March 29^th.

 

Eco Materials Adviser Blog Series - Introduction

So thanks to Loren for the introduction and for hosting this guest blog. I’m looking forward to engaging with the Autodesk Manufacturing community and sharing some thoughts on environmentally sustainable design and the tools that can support this. But first I’d like to provide a little background on Granta Design, our work in the area of sustainable design, and why we’re working with Autodesk in this area.

Granta was founded in 1994 as a spin-out from Cambridge University by two engineering professors – Mike Ashby and Dave Cebon. We offer a combination of software and data products, along with supporting services, that enable many of the world’s leading engineering organisations to address their materials-related challenges. These challenges range from selecting a material for a particular application, to managing materials test data, to identifying parts or materials in a product that have a high carbon footprint or contain restricted substances. We also provide dedicated software and supporting resources for teaching engineers and designers about materials-related issues. If you completed a materials or engineering degree in the last 20 years, there’s a good chance you’ll already be familiar with materials property charts, or ‘Ashby diagrams’, which provide a highly visual method for selecting materials.

In 2010 Granta partnered with Autodesk to develop the Eco Materials Adviser, a completely new tool for designers and engineers who recognise the need to reduce the environmental impacts of the products they design – but were struggling to get their hands on good quality data about materials and their impacts on the environment. I’m excited to be working with Autodesk to make Granta’s materials data and sustainable design tools available within Autodesk Inventor. By having these tools integrated into the CAD environment designers can really begin to deliver more environmentally sustainable products, without sacrificing performance or increasing costs.

In these blogs I’ll be drawing on my experience of helping companies to embed sustainability considerations into their design and innovation activities – and discussing the challenges and opportunities for designers and engineers wanting to make their products more sustainable. Next week I’ll kick off by discussing the business drivers for sustainable design. In future weeks I’ll be tackling questions such as, ‘what is an environmentally sustainable material choice?’, and providing guidance on how and where to integrate sustainability considerations into your design activity. Along the way I’ll be sharing tips on how to get the most from the functionality in Autodesk Inventor and the Eco Materials Adviser.

I look forward to sharing and hearing your feedback.

 

Guest blogger - Welcome Dr. Jamie O'Hare to the MFGToolbox

I wanted to take a quick minute and introduce Dr. Jamie O'Hare as a guest blogger on the MFGToolbox. Dr. Jamie O'Hare will be doing some posts over the next several weeks on the Granta Eco Materials Adviser for Autodesk Inventor.

 

Here is a quick video to refresh your memory of the Eco Materials Adviser (if you aren't already using it).

 

 

 

Jamie O’Hare is the Product Manager for Eco Design at Granta Design where he is responsible for the development of Granta’s ‘Eco Audit’ environmental assessment software. Prior to this, Jamie completed an industry-based PhD on the topic of eco-innovation tools for the early stages of product development. This research led to the development of a range of workshop-based tools for eco-innovation and explored the difficulties of embedding such tools within the product development process. Jamie has a background in mechanical engineering and also has expertise in environmental legislation having spent time with Environ UK advising corporate clients on their exposure to the RoHS and WEEE Directives. 

 

 

Please join me in welcoming Dr. O'Hare to the MFGToolbox. I hope you are looking forward to his posts as much as I am.

-lw

 

Autodesk Inventor Interface - Give us your feedback

via autodeskmfg.typepad.com

We are looking for feedback on the Autodesk Inventor UI. If you have any opinions, let us know what you think.

Steve Bedder has set up a survey to gather user feedback. If you are feeling vocal, we want to hear from you.

http://autodeskmfg.typepad.com/blog/2012/02/autodesk-inventor-interface-give-us-your-feedback.html

Modeling 3D Fractals with Autodesk Inventor 2012

Fractals? We're talking about fractals? Yes, yes we are.

Recently, I took the family to the Kalamazoo Valley Museum to see their Fractals as Art exhibit...along with all of the other great stuff they have there. I have always thought fractals were pretty interesting, and seeing the results in various forms is always pretty compelling. My kids (5 yr old, and 2 yr old) didn't care much about the math behind them...they just like the visual results. I thought I would use their interest as an example of discussing math theory with them. (Note: at this point my wife said "why do you always have to 'nerd up' a good thing?")

After seeing all of the visual results of fractals, I decided to work out some fractal based designs in Inventor 2012. I am not the smartest guy around...so, I wanted to take at some of the more basic fractal concepts. My first go at it wasn't going to be a Julia Set fractal. I am very confident I could do a Menger Sponge or Sierpenski Triangle in Inventor (or AutoCAD for that matter). Really, I wanted to take a look at doing something very familiar in a different way.

So, I decided on the Koch Snowflake.

The basic idea is a curve without tangents, constructable from elementary geometry with finite volume and infinite parameter. Now, the question was: could I do this in 3D? (and could I do it in a few hours before my son goes to bed, so he can see it).

Now, what I ended up making was not truly a 3D version of Koch Snowflake. A Koch divides each segment in thirds and inserts the original shape (a triangle). I was using triangle based pyramids..and decided to invert the next 'layer' as half the size of the previous pyramid. I hope that makes sense.

After doing some quick layout sketching (thanks Mr. Gascho for my geometry education), I got to work.




In Inventor, I just went with a simple process:

1 - Model triangle base pyramid (via loft to point)
2 - Insert work axis
3 - Create offset work plane for next pyramid creation
4 - repeat as often as needed




Once the initial geometry was built, it was just a matter of performing the necessary Circular Patterns around the existing work Axis.




Now, this is just the start. I could have kept going and added the additional fractal'ation to these areas (again, infinite parameter)...but, the little man was happy with what he saw.

...and I didn't want to risk 'nerding it up' with him too much.

-lw

Migrating to Autodesk Simulation 2012 - A customer's perspective

Change is not always easy – but it’s certainly not something you can afford to be afraid of if you want to grow your business. We recently spoke with Eddie Kolesar over at Esterline Power Systems (EPS) who is a de facto “change expert” – having driven countless major initiatives at his company – to get his insights on what has made them so successful in adopting new technology into their processes.

Here’s what we found out…

Finding the Right Partner

“You can buy software anywhere, but support is key,” was the first thing he mentioned when we spoke with him. EPS has been partnered up with KETIV, a leading Autodesk solutions provider, since they first started with the early versions of AutoCAD and through the migrations to Mechanical Desktop and
Inventor. It’s critical for their business that users are as productive as possible and the online events,
training, and support from KETIV helps ensure their engineers are best-in-class.

The EPS team also takes advantage of events such as Autodesk University and KETIV’s Advanced Manufacturing Academy along with the plethora of information available to users in the Autodesk Manufacturing Community.

Making the Switch

Continuous improvement is a big part of EPS's business philosophy, as they recognize the need to evolve and advance processes as an important part of growing the business. “Don’t be afraid of new software, it’s not a ‘switch.’ There is a migration process, and that is why it’s important to evaluate your options carefully and make sure that you have the support of the reseller,” Eddie mentioned.

An example of a switch EPS has recently undertaken involved their solution for simulating the performance of their products. A few years ago, the team recognized that they needed to be able to analyze both parts and full scale assemblies, so they purchased a license of ANSYS Mechanical.
He notes, “It did its stuff. The software was good but the support was really lacking.” After the acquisition of Algor by Autodesk, the team saw that they could get the same capabilities of ANSYS inside Autodesk
Simulation Mechanical and get support from KETIV, whom they trust at making their implementation significantly more successful than before.

A surprising aspect of the migration was the ease in which it was accomplished. “The functions are all there. They may be in a different spot and sometimes you may need some help, but with KETIV they make sure they really understand the problem and then help you solve it.”

Keep Thinking Ahead

The last piece of advice that Eddie shared with us was, “Think about the future. Don’t buy just for now, but for four to five years down the road. Think broader scope.” Wise words from someone that’s
seen, and driven, his fair share of change.

Esterline Power Systems designs and manufactures a broad range of high-reliable power switching and control components and equipment for aerospace, rail, and high-end industrial applications worldwide.