Software helps engineers meet safety requirements

ICEM Surf software is being used by a small, UK design engineering services supplier to help automotive industry OEMs meet quality and safety requirements for vehicle bodies and interiors.

ICEM Surf software is being used by a small, UK design engineering services supplier to help automotive industry OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers meet quality and safety requirements for vehicle bodies and interiors.

One of the many constraints under which automotive vehicle designers and development teams must work nowadays is the need to meet the increasing demands of the safety regulations set and upheld by the industry's various officially recognised regulatory and standards bodies.

This is, of course, no bad thing.

But it demands that, if unnecessary costs are not to be incurred during a vehicle's development, these constraints must be taken into account during the design and development phase of a vehicle programme.

It is no good discovering that a part fails to meet the appropriate safety regulations when it has already reached the tooling production stage.

Unbudgeted time and costs will then be required to rectify it, with the obvious knock-on effect which that has on the whole project.

One company that has gained considerable experience in recent years in helping automotive industry OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers avoid these unnecessary and unbudgeted costs is Surface Development and Engineering (SDE).

Based in Basildon, Essex in south-east England, SDE was founded in 2000 by its two directors and full-time employees, Mark Mason and Neale Williams.

Both are automotive engineers who between them have wide experience in body engineering and interior design, much of it gained at Jaguar Cars.

Today they provide surface design and engineering services to the automotive industry in the UK.

Most of their work involves the development of digital surface models of the complex free-form shapes demanded by the stylists and designers, while taking into account the engineering and manufacturing feasibility issues and tooling conditions that will apply at the production stage.

If SDE has any particular area in which it specialises, it is that of vehicle interiors, in particular, door trim, central consoles and instrument panels but they also undertake design development projects for vehicle exterior body components as well as interior components such as seats, headlining, A, B and C pillars and even full cockpits.

Tier 1 suppliers such as Visteon, Intier, Colins and Aikman and CNH, as well as OEMs, including Nissan and Ford have all used SDE's skills to good effect in these areas.

It is during its work for companies like these that SDE has found one of the optional, add-on facilities to its chosen design software tools suite - ICEM Surf - to be of significant benefit to its customers.

ICEM Surf is a suite of surface modelling, surface analysis and visualisation software that is used throughout the automotive vehicle design and manufacturing industry.

One of the optional add-on software modules to the base software is ICEM Safety Analysis.

It is this add-on module, together with ICEM Surf, that SDE has used to such good effect for its customers on a number of occasions recently.

Automotive vehicles are governed by numerous safety regulations.

To homologate parts and assemblies that are covered by these regulations, the governing authorities in different parts of the world inspect physical parts and assemblies for compliance.

One such test involves the use of a ball (or in the parlance, test-sphere) to check that the edges of any components with which a person could possibly come into contact in an accident meet the fillet radius specified in the regulations.

Simple enough, perhaps.

But on more than one occasion in the recent past, by using ICEM Safety Analysis to automate the checking process, SDE has been able to demonstrate to a Tier 1 supplier that a part as designed by the OEM and provided as a 3D CAD file to that supplier for use in the tooling and manufacturing process, would fail the European safety standards.

If the component in question has been developed with ICEM Surf, then the existing digital surface model is used in the test.

However, if it has been designed on a different system, such as Catia, I-deas or Unigraphics, the CAD model is first imported into the ICEM Surf environment.

Either way, once the surfaces to be analysed have been selected, the radius of the test-sphere, the minimum allowable radius of the surfaces and the tolerance required are entered and the analysis is run.

Results are presented graphically, with red indicating a surface that falls below the defined minimum, green indicating acceptable radii and blue representing areas the test-sphere cannot touch.

Armed with these results, the necessary modifications to the design can then be carried out by the owner of the part, before any tooling is laid down.

Nevertheless, while this use of ICEM Safety Analysis enables suppliers to identify problem areas before getting to the point where they need to scrap tools and parts and start again, it does not do away with the need for physical parts to be presented to the authorities for testing.

Today, however, SDE's customers send these parts, complete with a set of ICEM Surf visualisations of the automated safety analysis results.

These are accepted by the authorities as being correct and are used to resolve any ambiguities, saving time and unnecessary re-tooling costs.

But checking that parts meet the safety regulations is by no means all - or indeed, even the majority - of the work that SDE performs for its automotive industry customers.

Most of the partners' time is taken up with developing the Class A engineering surface models - and often their associated Class B surfaces, too - that accurately represent the shapes of a vehicle's exterior or interior components and that will be used in the final production tooling development process.

The new Ford Focus for the North American market, which went on sale in 2004, is a case in point.

SDE's involvement with this project started with a brief to assist Ford's design studio with the design of the interior trim for the front and rear doors, which differs from the existing European model's interior trim.

It ended up with SDE being responsible for the design development and generation of all the engineering surface models for the complete front and rear doors interior trim assemblies, right down to the release levers, pockets and even the audio system speaker frets.

As SDE's Mason and Williams point out, their role in projects such as this is to blend their appreciation of styling and their understanding of engineering so that they can act as a kind of 'mediator' between the creative aspects of the design process and the engineering and manufacturing feasibility aspects.

The surface models that they produce must not only contain all the styling requirements of the designer but must also be fully feasible engineering models from which tools can be manufactured.

William said: "Our philosophy is that the people responsible for generating the engineering surfaces, or what Ford Motor Company calls the 'surface lines' process, should also be responsible for completing every fine detail, from an engineering perspective, of all the visible features of a part, right through to making it ready for tooling production".

"It is the fine details that affect the final appearance and quality of a part".

This philosophy has found favour with many of SDE's customers, especially in the supplier community, for one good reason.

It is the responsibility of a supplier to an OEM to produce what was designed, even if the design data provided is unfinished or infeasible from a manufacturing standpoint - which it may well be, given the pressures that are often placed on the available resources within an OEM's internal product development team.

ICEM Surf plays an important role here for SDE by enabling it to help both OEMs and suppliers meet the appropriate levels of design quality and manufacturability for their parts, whether they have been designed by the OEM, the supplier or by SDE.

Using some of the in-built facilities of ICEM Surf, SDE is able to finish off incomplete design models developed elsewhere by importing the data into ICEM Surf and then adding such things as draft angles, fillets and parting lines in order to ensure the feasibility and quality of the final manufactured part.

But it goes further than that.

ICEM Surf also offers a facility known as 'global offset'.

This is often used by SDE to generate the Class B surfaces associated with Class A surface models, that is, the offset that represents the thickness of the material from which the part will be manufactured.

Using this global offset facility, SDE is able to generate new surfaces from selected existing surfaces, at a constant distance from the originals - whether these originals were created in ICEM Surf or with another CAD system.

Not only can ICEM Surf perform several single offset functions, it can intelligently extrapolate and trim the new surfaces to form the required complete surface definition.

This capability has proved to be of particular benefit to SDE and its customers in its work on vehicle interiors, whose free-form shapes are very often much more complex than are those for vehicle exteriors.

"Although solid modelling systems used by the OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers offer some level of surface modelling capability, they are not very reliable when it comes to generating surface offsets for the Class B surfaces".

"And they get worse at it, the more complex the original surface model becomes", said SDE's Mason".

"ICEM Surf enables us to generate Class B surfaces quickly and efficiently and to provide them to the OEM or supplier, along with the Class A surface models required for tooling".

"They can then use these Class B surface models in their own solid modelling CAD system to add the necessary brackets and fixings that are needed to complete the detail design of a component".

But the partners agree that at the end of the day, what really matters is the ability that ICEM Surf's advanced surface modelling and analysis facilities gives them to ensure that parts and assemblies satisfy engineering and manufacturing feasibility requirements, at the same time as maintaining the original styling and design intent.

It is this, together with a philosophy that puts final quality and manufacturability at the forefront of the development process that has ensured that Surface Development and Engineering's order book is kept full by its automotive industry customers.

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