Finite Element Analysis Template Approach to Support Web Based Customer Centric Design

To survive in today’s volatile market, companies are striving to deliver greater quality, more customization and innovative designs by offering user customizable products. Mass customization features products that can be altered or changed by the customer to fit his/her needs. In order to incorporate customer specifications it is necessary to integrate the customer into the design process. Offering customized products while maintaining the reliability and efficiency of mass produced products calls for new tools and strategies in the design and manufacturing process. This paper presents a web based mass customization framework to provide customizable products in real time by integrating the customer into the design process. The approach is based on template(s) to automatically generate CAD models from customer specifications. Structural feasibility of the user specified configurations are then evaluated using automated Finite Element Analysis and communicated back to the user in real time. To achieve automated analysis a Product Family CAD and FEA template is presented. The CAD and FEA product family template generalizes the rules and guidelines for the entire product family to allow users to generate any member product. The template and the framework is implemented using commercial software. The applicability of the system is illustrated for web based customization of bicycle frames.