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Extending the Use of Design Automation Within 3D-Modelling of Tool Inserts : A project investigating the possibility of reusing and adapting an existing design automation in a similar situation.

About eighty percent of all engineering work done today is repetitive, and about ninety percent of all engineering work consist of modelling minor changes. By replacing all the repetitive human engineering work with computers, the engineers could instead focus on creating new products or improving the existing. This could make companies more competitive and increase sales. Using design automation to model small changes would also enable companies to produce small batches at a lower cost. This project is done in collaboration with Thule Group. One of Thule’s largest product categories contain roof racks. The company manufacture the roof racks at their warehouse in Sweden and all variant modelling of them are performed by their technicians and engineers. For every new car model that is released, a new variant of the attachment for the roof racks needs to be modelled. There are different types of brackets used in the attachments, whereas two of them are called Evo Clamp and Evo Flush. For each new car model, new tool inserts for the manufacturing of the brackets also needs to be modelled. In previous research, a design automation process of the tool inserts for Evo Clamp was created. This project aims to use the outcome from that research to create a new design automation process for tool inserts to create Evo Flush. To execute the project, the DRM framework was used. To gather information, a literature study and an empirical study were performed. Furthermore, the design automation was created using VB.NET and Solidworks. To evaluate the outcome of the project, three factors were set up to test the process by. The outcome from this project was also compared to the outcome from the Evo Clamp research. The results showed that it was difficult to reuse and adapt the previous research since the templates for the tool inserts of the two different brackets were modelled in two completely different ways. Therefore, the main conclusion from this project is that; if the intention is to automate a process, then this must be kept in mind when modelling the components and templates. To have concrete modelling guidelines seems to be even more important if the intention is to reuse code from one process when automating another.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-187191
Date January 2022
CreatorsSvensson, Amanda
PublisherLinköpings universitet, Produktrealisering
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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