Automated Manufacturability Analysis of the Draw Bending of Complex Aluminum Profiles

Manufacturing companies are required to develop and produce products that meet increased requirements from customers and investors on shortened time spans. One key factor in meeting these requirements is the efficiency of the product development and the production preparation process. Design automation is a powerful tool to increase efficiency in these two processes. The benefits of automating the production preparation process are shortened lead-time, improved product performance, and ultimately decreased cost. Further, automation is beneficial as it increases the ability to adapt products to new product specifications with production preparations done in few or in a single step. During the automation process, knowledge about the production preparation process is collected and stored in the corporation systems, thus allowing full control over the design of production equipments. The contribution of this work is a method for connecting knowledge pieces implemented in auxiliary software applications using an inference engine. The knowledge pieces can control CAD-models and automatically generate, execute, and interpret finite element analyses. The presented method allows the automation of corporation know-how developed by skilled engineers over time. Further, it is possible for the resulting systems to meet criteria for good design automation systems such as low effort of developing, low level of investment, user readable and understandable knowledge, scalability, and flexibility. The method is exemplified by an implementation for analyzing manufacturability of the rotary draw bending of extruded sections of aluminum where the sections are complex. The output from the example system is based on established design practice and heuristic knowledge developed over many years of practical experience, rules analytically derived from fundamental physical laws, and finite element calculations. The system applies knowledge to a given specification that a skilled engineer otherwise would do manually. The method is described along with the example system in this paper.