XVL Studio provides automated design review

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Nov 13, 2008

Rachael Taggart explains how XVL Studio from Lattice Technology delivers accurate, fast design review tools while working alongside a 3D Cad system.

Design review in a manufacturing process involves close scrutiny of a design to establish and verify correct design practices, manufacturability, assembly issues, material choices, and even how it will be marketed and shipped.

XVL Studio is a feature-rich application that includes fast, accurate design review tools.

Traditional design review processes involved a series of group meetings, with a lot of paper drawings and a lot of red ink.

Recreating this using 3D design data would appear to be a simple process - simply share the 3D data with those tasked with design review and allow them to view it on a computer.

But that aspect of the process is fraught with problems.

As 3D design has become accepted across the global manufacturing community, the sheer size of 3D assemblies has become massive, meaning that the data cannot be easily exchanged.

When trying to share a 10Gbyte assembly with 10 people the network slows down.

As the data is shared around, team members with older, slower computers struggle to open a file of that size.

If they can view it, the assembly tends to be so complex that they cannot understand all the potential conflicts using normal Cad viewing tools.

While some 3D Cad systems offer some interference checking tools, none of them offer the ability to find multiple instances and errors on a single part, and thereby multiple errors on an assembly are impossible to locate and find.

Many companies offer digital design review and then transpose all the findings to a standard format such as an Excel spreadsheet, for use across the operation.

Creating these spreadsheets can take days to complete.

XVL Studio from Lattice Technology uses the XVL format for 3D data.

This format delivers compression rates of 50 - 250 times smaller than the original data, but with no loss of accuracy of the data.

Many lightweight formats force a compromise on accuracy for file size, XVL does not.

This means that the 10Gbyte 3D assembly can now be as small as 100Mbytes, which makes it far easier to communicate, share and exchange across a network.

Once you have data in XVL, you can use it in XVL Studio.

XVL Studio is an application that includes fast, accurate design review tools.

This means that an assembly can be rapidly checked for interference, clearance, gap and contact and the results can be viewed in the application, then automatically extracted to Excel spreadsheet.

Furthermore, the checks within XVL Studio are mathematically accurate on 3D data.

One customer using XVL Studio for design review compared the automated design review to doing it manually on a 3D Cad file.

In the test, they found that the design review using the 3D Cad file took 270 hours.

The same data in XVL using XVL Studio took 90 hours.

Using XVL digital manufacturing operations delivers functionality that works with current 3D Cad systems and data, enabling the user to insert automated design review into a digital manufacturing process.