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What Remains to Be Solved in Mechanical CAD?



I keep mourning the passing of CAD as a topic interesting enough to keep producing interesting articles about it. It used to be that you didn’t have to look far to find a great technical topic, or a new way to apply CAD tools. On the Solidworks (desktop — do I really have to specify what the name implies?) side of things, for instance, development has been largely uninteresting.To get more news about mechanical cad drawings, you can visit shine news official website.

Developments in design technology seem currently focused on 3D printing: improvements in materials, methods, support structures, finer structures, finishes, and machines to go bigger and smaller. The surge in robotics is related to the hardware side of 3D printing, and also is going gangbusters.
Let’s take a look at what general 3D CAD development has achieved in the last decade or so, and then look forward to what we can hope for in the next decade. The big topics CAD developers have tackled include these ones:
Not all of these have been ubiquitous, and not all have impacted all CAD users, but most CAD users have access to these solutions when they need them.

Mechanical CAD with 3D scan-and-print has been a great success in specialty areas like medical and dental. If recent wars have an upside, it in the development of next-generation prosthetics, some strictly mechanical, some with newly developed neural interfaces. Scanning and printing have allowed us to customize attachments to individual injuries, quickly replacing and repairing limbs, and even joints.

When it comes strictly to mechanical CAD, I think we’re in a lull period right now. With all these other interesting things to do, the base technology has been forgotten for a while.

At the same time, some of the big ticket items that CAD developers put on the table haven’t really caught on.Cloud. I think there was an assumption that cloud computing was going to be embraced in the same way that PC CAD was embraced in the 1990s. But it hasn’t. Clearly, it works for some people, but not for everyone.

Synchronous Technology. The ST push by Siemens from a decade ago also hasn’t really caught on in the way I had hoped. I really believe in this technology and its application to general mechanical design. (It is far simpler and easier to control models with ST than using history-based design.)

This tech will catch on eventually, but too many intransigent engineers have too much invested in overly-complex history-based systems, and so haven’t taken the time to understand the real advantages of synchronous modeling.
Where Do We Go Next?
I’ve made predictions about the future of CAD before. I thought engineer-to-order was the next big thing, as would be synchronous modeling. They weren’t. I predicted CAD-in-the-cloud was not going to be the next big thing; so far, this is my closest to a good guess.

And when is A.I. going to show up, or do we not have the piles of unsorted data required to make A.I. successful?

I really hope the idea of converging different types of data keeps developing, as well as mesh manipulation tools for mechanical CAD. There are so many sub-d tools out there that every big CAD developer should buy one just to understand the data type, the tools involved, their usage, and applications of this kind of modeling. We don’t have to re-develop all of this knowledge.

Another thing I hope gets some play are more specialized tools. We already have tools specific to designing sheet metal parts, frames, piping, and in medical fields. I think more needs to be done with plastic, assemblies, resilience, and local design.

Plastics Design. Plastic parts are so hard to design. The outsides are all minute, custom-made details; the insides, that you don’t even see, can be even more difficult to design. We need a series of functional features that can be applied to models. Maybe this requires a special file format just for plastic parts, as with the other specialized techniques.

Plastic designing and manufacturing need to come closer together. The design of the outside shape and mechanical details, and the manufacturing expertise to make individual plastic parts need to be centralized so that a single person can make the decisions about design and manufacturing. Throwing designs over the Great Wall is not going to be a viable solution going forward.

Assembly Design. And we have to do something about assembly design. Right now, it’s a custom approach every time. We need a tool that follows a process for assemblies, and can reuse information on how assemblies go together. Is it rules based? A.I.? Can it somehow learn about different types of joints, closures, and mechanisms?

We need tools that know how to work with horizontal modeling, resilience, top down, layouts, master models — all these are methods that design software should be able to replicate, and even guide you through. We’re at a point where forcing dumb tools to do smart things is just inadequate. Best Practice rules already exist to help people use tools in poorly structured workflows.

Sustainable Design. Beyond software, I’d like to see product development aim to be more durable and reusable, to get away from single-use products, especially in plastics and packaging. As engineers and designers (and, yes, even marketers), we need to have a conscience. Reject bad ideas.

Throw-away products have always been a bad idea, but someone other than the people for whom this is a religious cause needs to stand up and say so. We need to design stuff that endures, and when it doesn’t endure, it needs to be fixable, and when it can’t be fixed, it need to be recyclable. Not that long ago and certainly in my lifetime, we used to have less stuff, but the stuff we had was more valuable. It lasted longer, because it was built and designed with use in mind, rather than crass consumption.

Local Design. Maybe all of this heads back to more employee-owned companies. I don’t think driving the economy with a bunch of disinterested investors is good for anyone, and obviously centrally-managed economies have shown they don’t work. Globalism is a failure.

Certainly we need to learn to do things locally again. The bigger an organization gets (including government), the more corrupt it becomes, the more disconnected it is from the people who make it work, and should be benefiting from it. Stop sending product development and manufacturing to China. Manufacture molds locally again, make microelectronic chips locally again.