The IKEA sliding door system is widely employed on IKEA’s wardrobes. In view of the massive usage of it, any optimization for reducing production costs is crucial. This work attempts to develop a special static test rig for a component of IKEA’s sliding door system. It will be used to check the quality of the component in production. The simulation-driven design method will be used in the entire process. Therefore, before proceeding with the details of the test rig, the priority should be given to the simulation. In particular, the nonlinear finite element method (FEM) will be used to identify the break load of the studied component. Finite element models were created in ABAQUS/Standard. Four kinds of POM were used to define the model’s material properties. Meanwhile the compression experiment were also conducted. Finite element models were used to predict the load capacity and compare it with the experimental results. The closest prediction in relation to the test results was 2124N, merely 6N smaller than the experimental results, giving the proof of a good finite element analysis. Based on the results of simulations and compression tests, a proper test rig consisting of a pneumatic system and load cell was selected from four concepts. The air cylinder can provide 3175N when the supplied air is 0.7MPa, which is fully met the design requirements with reasonable price.

This thesis of 15 hp has been implemented at Halmstad University, in collaboration with Saab Dynamics in Linköping. Saab Dynamics is a company operating in the defence industry where competition is tough. This necessitates new ways to increase efficiency in the company, which is the basis for this thesis. Saab Dynamics wants to introduce simulation driven design. Since Saab Dynamics engineers have little experience of simulation, required a user methodology with clear guidelines. Due to lack of time, they chose to assign the task to students, which resulted in this thesis. The aim of the thesis is to develop a methodology in mechanical design, where the designer uses the FE analysis early in the design process to develop the structures' mechanical properties. The methodology should be seen as a guide and a source of information to enable an iterative approach with FE-analysis, which is the basis of simulation-driven design. The iterative process of simulation driven design, which can lead to reduced lead times and cost savings in the design process. The work was carried out by three students from the mechanical engineering program between December 2014 and May 2015. Because of the scale of the project, it has been carried out by a total of three students with individual focus areas. The work has followed a self-developed method and the project began with theoretical studies of the topic to get an understanding of what has been done and what research in simulation driven design. Then conducted an empirical study on the Saab Dynamics in Linköping, in order to increase understanding of how the design process looks like. Meanwhile, sustainable development and ethical aspects has been taken into account. Much time has been devoted to investigate the possibilities and limitations of 3D Experience, which is Dassault Systèmes latest platform for 3D modelling- and simulation software. 3D Experience is the software, the methodology is based on. This thesis has resulted in a methodology for simulating at the designer level that the project team in consultation with the supervisor at Saab Dynamics managed to adapt to the company's requirements.

During the last decades the product lifecycle has been shortened and as a consequence the majority of manufacturing companies have focused on decrease the time to market. Several companies within the automotive industry have during the last years implemented Simulation Driven Product Development as a method to reduce lead time, increase quality and reduce development cost for their products. This study is divided into three areas; (1) Investigate the applicability of Simulation Driven Product Development in a Lean Product Development environment. (2) Examine the preconditions for implementing Simulation Driven Product Development. (3) Study the possible effects in a product development process of using simulations performed by design engineers. By studying available literature in the area of Lean and Simulation Driven Product Development the consistence of the two product development philosophies are rather high. Simulation Driven Product Development tends to support the principles of Lean as well as reduce different kinds of waste that normally is present at a R&D department. In order to implement a Simulation Driven Product Development a number of preconditions were identified; e.g. knowledge and experience within both physical and virtual testing, cross functional synchronizations, trust for simulation results and incentives from management. These factors, among a couple of others, are according to the theory and case studies preconditions for a successful implementation where the primary case is based on Scania, but Saab Automobile AB, Jaguar Land Rover and AB Volvo is also analyzed in the benchmarking study. Simulations performed by design engineers will increase the potential of Simulation Driven Product Development in several ways. A major finding from the study is that it enhances the understanding for properties of the items among design engineers. The increased understanding also increase the knowledge and decrease the learning cycle time for the design engineers. It also seems to be a resource efficient way since waiting times are reduced. The need of support from simulation groups might also reduce the communication barriers between different groups and increase the cross functional work. / Eftersom produktlivscykeln blir allt kortare har utvecklingstiden för produkter fått ett ökat fokus. Inom fordonsindustrin har simuleringsdriven produktutveckling använts som en metod för att reducera ledtid samtidigt som kvaliteten förstärks och den totala utvecklingskostnaden sänks. Detta examensarbete är uppdelat i tre olika områden: Det första utreder huruvida simuleringsdriven produktutveckling är förenligt med Lean produktutveckling. Det andra området fokuserar på förutsättningar för att kunna implementera en simuleringsdriven utvecklingsprocess. Det tredje och sista området fokuserar på konstruktörssimuleringars inverkan på produktutvecklingsprocessens effektivitet. Förenligheten mellan Simuleringsdriven produktutveckling och Lean produktutveckling är hög, enligt befintlig litteratur. Simuleringsdriven produktutveckling stödjer flertalet av principerna till Lean samtidigt som det bidrar till att reducera slöseri på forskning och utvecklingsavdelningen. De två andra forskningsfrågorna angrips med hjälp av litteratur såväl som fallstudier. Den huvudsakliga fallstudien genomförs på Scania, men även Saab Automobile AB, Jaguar Land Rover och AB Volvo studeras i syfte att öka examensarbetets generaliserbarhet. Studierna identifierar ett antal viktiga faktorer för att kunna implementera en simuleringsdriven produktutveckling: incitament för en förändring från ledningen, kunskap inom både fysisk och virtuell provning, tvärfunktionell synkronisering, en tydlig och framtung produktutvecklingsprocess och tillit till simuleringar. Konstruktörssimuleringar kan på flera sätt höja potentialen hos simuleringsdriven produktutveckling. Det ger konstruktören en ökad förståelse för sin komponents fysiska egenskaper. Tät feedback från simuleringarna kortar inlärningstiden hos konstruktörerna och resulterar även i mer genomarbetade produkter. För att lyckas med dessa simuleringar krävs ett nära samarbete mellan konstruktion och beräkning vilket bidrar till att öka det tvärfunktionella arbetet och minskar kommunikationsbarriärerna mellan konstruktions ‐ och beräkningsgrupper.

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This master thesis has been executed at Scania CV AB in Södertälje, Sweden. Scania is a manufacturer of heavy transport solutions, an industry which is changing rapidly in order to meet stricter regulations, ensuring a sustainable future. Continuous product improvements and new technologies are required to increase performance and to meet markets requirements. By implementing design optimization in the design process it enables the potential of supporting design exploration, which is beneficial when products with high performance are developed. The purpose was to show the potential of design optimization supported by simulation driven design as a tool in the development process. To examine an alternative way of working for design engineers, elaborating more competitive products in terms of economical and performance aspects. Furthermore, to minimize time and iterations between divisions by developing better initial concept proposals. The alternative working method was developed iteratively in parallel with a case study. The case study was a suction strainer and were used for method improvements and validation, as well as decision basis for the included sub-steps. The working method for implementing design optimization and simulation driven design ended up with a procedure consisted of three main phases, concept generation, detail design and verification. In the concept generation phase topology optimization was used, which turned out to be a beneficial method to find optimized solutions with few inputs. The detail design phase consisted of a parameterized CAD model of the concept which then was shape optimized. The shape optimization enabled design exploration of the concept which generated valuable findings to the product development. Lastly the optimized design was verified with more thorough methods, in this case verification with FE-experts. The working method was tested and verified on the case study component, this resulted in valuable knowledge for future designs for similar components. The optimized component resulted in a performance increase where the weight was decrease by 54% compared with a reference product.

With both tougher competition and legislations, companies always strive to improve their products while cutting unnecessary costs. This master’s thesis investigates if the after-treatment systems department at the heavy-duty vehicle company Scania CV AB in Södertälje, Sweden can improve their development process by implementing automated FEM pre-processes for welded sheet metal components. The research is based upon theory from various fields within product development, knowledge-based engineering, FEM and design optimization, contributing to an understating of what effects this project could have on the development process as a whole. Large parts of the pre-processes used at the department today were identified as repetitive and suitable for automation. Using a simplified CAD model of an after-treatment system as a case study, a methodology for more efficient FEM pre-processes was developed. The methodology includes changes to the workflow between the design engineer and the CAE engineer as well as a software that automatically meshes welded sheet metal products. First of all, the design engineer inserts lines representing the weld positions in the CAD model and exports the model to the CAE engineer. Hereafter, the CAE engineer simply selects necessary settings for the mesh and launches the developed software that automatically meshes the sheet metal components as well as identifies and meshes the welds. The technique used to mesh the welds in HyperMesh fails for certain weld characteristics, resulting in a robustness of 54 % of the total weld length for the worst case in the case study. These characteristics are welds crossing other welds, welds adjacent to a sharp corner and welds containing a sharp corner. By excluding these problem areas when defining the lines in CATIA, the robustness increases substantially to between 72 % and 88 % of the total weld length in the case study, where the exclusion zones represent 3 % of the total weld length. Based on the case study, the developed methodology could potentially shorten the iterative development process between the design and CAE engineer with a total of 25 %, while the CAE engineer’s tasks in the development process can be cut with up to 60 %. This allows for more time being focused on value-adding tasks, resulting in higher quality products and an increased profit for the company.

The development of more complex products has increased dependency on virtual/digital models and emphasized the role of simulations as a means of validation before production. This level of dependency on digital models and simulation togetherwith the customization level and continuous requirement change leads to a large number of iterations in each stage of the product development process. This research, studies such group of products that have multidisciplinary, highly iterative, and simulation-driven design processes. It is shown that these high-level technical products, which are commonly outsourced to suppliers, commonly suffer from a long development lead time. The literature points to several research tracks including design automation and data-driven design with possible support. After studying the advantages and disadvantages of each track, a data-driven approachis chosen and studied through two case studies leading to two supporting tools that are expected to improve the development lead time in associated design processes. Feature extraction in CAD as a way to facilitate metamodeling is proposed as the first solution. This support uses the concept of the medial axis to find highly correlated features that can be used in regression models. As for the second supporting tool, an automated CAD script is used to produce a library of images associated with design variants. Dynamic relaxation is used to label each variant with its finite element solution output. Finally, the library is used to train a convolutions neural network that maps screenshots of CAD as input to finite element field answers as output. Both supporting tools can be used to create real-time prediction models in the early conceptual phases of the product development process to explore design space faster and reduce lead time and cost. / Utvecklingen av mer komplexa produkter har ökat beroendet av virtuella/digitala modeller och ökat betydelsen av simuleringar för att validera en produkt inför produktion. Ett stort beroende av digitala modeller och simulering tillsammans med den individuella anpassningen och kontinuerliga kravförändringar leder till ett stort antal iterationer i varje steg i produktutvecklingsprocessen. Forskningen som presenteras i denna avhandling studerar denna typ av produkter som har multidisciplinära, mycket iterativa och simuleringsdrivna designprocesser. Det har visat sig att dessa tekniska produkter på hög nivå, som vanligtvis tillhandahålls av underleverantörer, vanligtvis har en lång ledtid för utveckling. Litteraturstudien pekar på flera forskningsspår, exempelvis designautomation och datadriven design, eventuellt med stöd. Efter att ha studerat fördelarna och nackdelarna med varje spår, väljs det datadrivna tillvägagångssättet och studeras genom två fallstudier som leder till att två stödjande verktyg tas fram. De förväntas förbättra utvecklingsledtiden i tillhörande designprocesser. Feature extraktion i CAD som ett sätt att underlätta metamodellering föreslås som det första verktyget. Detta stöd använder medial axis för att hitta korrelerade features som kan användas i regressionsmodeller. När det gäller det andra stödjande verktyget används ett automatiserat CAD-skript för att producera ett stort bibliotek med bilder som är associerade olika designvarianter. Dynamisk relaxation används för att märka varje variant med dess finita elementlösning. Slutligen används detta bibliotek för att träna ett konvolutionerande neuralt nätverk som kartlägger skärmdumpar av CAD som indata till finita elementfältsvar som utdata. Båda stödverktygen kan användas för att skapa modeller för förutsägelser i realtid i de tidiga konceptuella faserna av produktutvecklingsprocessen för att utforska designrymden snabbare och minska ledtid och kostnader.

Scania are known among to be the world’s leading supplier of transport solutions for heavy trucks and buses. Scania’s goal is to develop combustion engines that achieve low-pollutant emissions as well as lower carbon-footprint with higher efficiency. To achieve the above Scania has invested resources in Simulation Driven Design of parametric CAD models which drives design innovation rather than following the design. This enables in creating flexible and robust models in their design process. This master thesis is being conducted in collaboration with Scania exhaust after treatment systems department, focusing on developing a methodology to automatically evaluate the cost and manufacturability of a parametric model, which is intended for an agile working environment with fast iterations within Scania. From the thesis methodology’s data collection process literature study, former thesis work and interviews with designers and cost engineers at Scania, a proposed method is developed that can be implemented during the design process. The method involved four different phase they are Design phase, Analysis phase, Validation phase and Improvement phase. The proposed method is evaluated to check the method feasibility for evaluation on parameteric CAD parts for manufacturability and costing. This proposed method is applied on two different parts of a silencer as part of a case study which is mainly to evaluate the results from Improvement phase. The focus of this thesis is to realise the proposed method through simulation software like sheet metal stamping/forming simulation, cost evaluating tool where the simulation driven design process is achieved. This is done with the help of collaboration between parameteric CAD models and the above simulation software under a common MDO framework through DOE study run or optimisation study runs. The resultant designs is later considered to be improved design in terms of manufacturability and costing.

This thesis of 15 hp has been implemented at Halmstad University, in collaboration with Saab Dynamics in Linköping. Saab Dynamics is a company operating in the defence industry where competition is tough. This necessitates new ways to increase efficiency in the company, which is the basis for this thesis. Saab Dynamics wants to introduce simulation driven design. Since Saab Dynamics engineers have little experience of simulation, required a user methodology with clear guidelines. Due to lack of time, they chose to assign the task to students, which resulted in this thesis. The aim of the thesis is to develop a methodology in mechanical design, where the designer uses the FE analysis early in the design process to develop the structures' mechanical properties. The methodology should be seen as a guide and a source of information to enable an iterative approach with FE-analysis, which is the basis of simulation-driven design. The iterative process of simulation driven design, which can lead to reduced lead times and cost savings in the design process. The work was carried out by three students from the mechanical engineering program between December 2014 and May 2015. Because of the scale of the project, it has been carried out by a total of three students with individual focus areas. The work has followed a self-developed method and the project began with theoretical studies of the topic to get an understanding of what has been done and what research in simulation driven design. Then conducted an empirical study on the Saab Dynamics in Linköping, in order to increase understanding of how the design process looks like. Meanwhile, sustainable development and ethical aspects has been taken into account. Much time has been devoted to investigate the possibilities and limitations of 3D Experience, which is Dassault Systèmes latest platform for 3D modelling- and simulation software. 3D Experience is the software, the methodology is based on. This thesis has resulted in a methodology for simulating at the designer level that the project team in consultation with the supervisor at Saab Dynamics managed to adapt to the company's requirements.

This thesis of 15 hp has been implemented at Halmstad University, incollaboration with Saab Dynamics in Linköping. Saab Dynamics is a companyoperating in the defence industry where competition is tough. This necessitatesnew ways to increase efficiency in the company, which is the basis for this thesis.Saab Dynamics wants to introduce simulation driven design. Since SaabDynamics engineers have little experience of simulation, required a usermethodology with clear guidelines. Due to lack of time, they chose to assign thetask to students, which resulted in this thesis.The aim of the thesis is to develop a methodology in mechanical design, wherethe designer uses the FE analysis early in the design process to develop thestructures' mechanical properties. The methodology should be seen as a guide anda source of information to enable an iterative approach with FE-analysis, which isthe basis of simulation-driven design. The iterative process of simulation drivendesign, which can lead to reduced lead times and cost savings in the designprocess.The work was carried out by three students from the mechanical engineeringprogram between December 2014 and May 2015. Because of the scale of theproject, it has been carried out by a total of three students with individual focusareas.The work has followed a self-developed method and the project began withtheoretical studies of the topic to get an understanding of what has been done andwhat research in simulation driven design. Then conducted an empirical study onthe Saab Dynamics in Linköping, in order to increase understanding of how thedesign process looks like. Meanwhile, sustainable development and ethicalaspects has been taken into account.Much time has been devoted to investigate the possibilities and limitations of 3DExperience, which is Dassault Systèmes latest platform for 3D modelling- andsimulation software. 3D Experience is the software, the methodology is based on.This thesis has resulted in a methodology for simulating at the designer level thatthe project team in consultation with the supervisor at Saab Dynamics managed toadapt to the company's requirements.