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Today, the packaging machinery industry faces a unique set of challenges that
stretch its engineering capabilities to the limits. Consumer goods producers are
striving to evolve containers into new shapes to appeal to continually changing
customer needs and tastes. Nearly every machine produced by a packaging
machinery company is a one-of-a-kind creation designed to bring a package
designers creation to life, to increase production rates, or to lower costs.
To succeed in this business, you must be able to create new machines rapidly
and easily. With state-of-the-art software, you can reuse previous design work
to create multiple variations of a product in a single document. Plus, you can
develop and manage families of parts and models with different dimensions,
components, properties, or other parameters. The goal, says a leading packaging
machine designer, is to develop 80-90% of each new machine by using standard
modules and components, and then use streamlined engineering processes to
develop the other 10-20% in minimal time.
However, the need to move fast is not an excuse for making mistakes. When
building a custom machine, you have to get it right the first time; and if you
dont, you may have to do it all over again at your own expense. Getting it
right means designing a machine that not only can perform well during acceptance
testing, but also can operate 24x7, 365 days a year, for years and yearsand
under environmental conditions that can vary from a dusty bakery to a damp dairy
products plant.
Today, leading providers of 3D computer aided design (CAD) software provide a
unique set of tools that can meet these challenges. You can use sub-systems and
assemblies developed by your company, as well as those from industry standards
groups and component producers. They also offer a wide range of design
validation tools for evaluating a product prototype, so you can identify and fix
problems before you even build your machine. The software provides links to
computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and generates the bill of materials needed
for assembly and testing of the machine. Finally, you can utilize the 3D
assembly model to quickly create project documentation.
Serving your Customers
Experienced packaging industry professionals tell us that one of their
greatest challenges today is taking advantage of existing designs to meet their
customers needs for one-of-a-kind machines at reasonable prices. With 3D CAD
software, you can address this concern at the proposal stage, and then quickly
deliver a competitive quote, while still having time to bid on other jobs.
Because today the best of breed 3D CAD software allows you to reuse 2D
drawings and 3D models, you can quickly generate an accurate cost proposal based
on your past completed jobs. Integrated product data management (PDM) solutions,
securely archives and organizes multiple versions of previous projects. As a
result, you can quickly search both 2D and 3D designs to find a relative
baseline. Once the correct job is found, the data management software automates
the duplication of projects to quickly get you started on the new proposal.
Using an interface thats familiar to designers, they can leverage files from
previous jobs in their native format irrespective of the vendor.
With eDrawings software, you can further streamline the proposal process by
improving communications with your customers. You can deliver 2D drawings and 3D
models to your customers, who can view, print, and review them with free viewer
software. In addition to panning and rotating the model for viewing at every
angle, your customers can also provide feedback by using intuitive markup tools.
By providing animations that allow your customers to view the virtual machine in
operation, you will demonstrate why your proposal is superior to others.
eDrawing is the best way to engage your customers in the proposal process, and
to differentiate your company from the competition.
Component Selection
Anywhere between 20-70% of the content of a typical packaging machine
consists of purchased components, such as motors, drives, bearings, and
hydraulic cylinders. As a result, you are forced to redesign purchased and
commonly used components with each project. However, with design libraries now
built into 3D CAD software, you can access a wide range of standard,
vendor-specific, and internal company design libraries at one central location.
To add new parts to your machine, simply drag and drop them into your design.
The tool box facility incorporates standard parts, such as fasteners,
bearings, retaining rings, and gears. You can drag and drop bolts, nuts, and
washers from the toolbox and snap them into place on the assembly. The smart
part technology automatically sizes and positions the components according to
where and how they interface in the assembly.
In the past, you were often forced to use out-of-date paper catalogs as a
reference for redrawing purchased components. Now, a 3D content library gives
you easy access to 3D CAD models from leading components manufacturers, such as
SMC, Boston Gear, Danaher Motion, Bimba, and Warner Electric Break. You can
browse product categories to view competitive products, configure suppliers
parts to meet your requirements, and drag and drop their products right into
your designsaving time and improving accuracy. Design libraries consists of
features, parts, and assemblies that can be dragged into new machine designs,
thereby promoting reuse and providing a platform to develop company standards.
Mechanical Design
When every machine you build is one-of-a-kind, you need to design it right
before it goes into production. So the presence of a wide range of virtual
prototyping tools can help you correctly identify and solve software problems up
front. In addition to viewing the components, sub-assemblies, and the complete
machine from all angles, you can examine internal components at any stage of the
design process. Plus, you can move components through their full range of
motion, automatically identifying clearances and detecting interferences. With
the ability to find problems early in the process, you can quickly communicate
design intent to your customers, manufacturing, and maintenance.
With the production level drawing and detailing capabilities which is now
present in industry benchmarking 3D CAD software, you can quickly and accurately
develop drawings from the 3D designincluding the automatic generation of
orthographic, section, and detail views. Any change to the machine is accurately
reflected in all project drawings automatically.
Recognizing the need to partner customers to success, leading 3D CAD software
suppliers provide unparalleled performance in modeling machines with tens of
thousands of components. With top-down design, you can tie together interrelated
components; so if one changes, the related components will also change. You can
use this powerful feature to take full advantage of the assembly model.
The availability of a wide array of process-specific tools has as additional
asset for you. For weldment design, you can use an intuitive layout approach to
quickly capture design intent. By utilizing weldbeads, gussets, caps, and cut
lists, you can complete your weldment design and documentation. The presence of
powerful and intuitive tools helps in creating advanced sheet-metal designs in
folded and flat states. The software automatically applies all sheet-metal
properties, such as metal thickness, bend radius, and bend relief, and automates
the process of creating flanges, tabs, lofted bends, flat patterns, normal cuts,
corner cuts, normal treatments, hems, jogs, and more.
With 3D CAD, you have the flexibility to create multiple versions of parts,
assemblies, and drawings in a single document, thereby maximizing the
opportunities for reuse. You can also explore various what if scenarios by
turning on or off different configurations of a part or an assembly and using
analysis tools to evaluate their performance.
Typically, packaging machinery companies must guarantee that their
one-of-a-kind products can withstand a cumbersome duty cycle. With the inbuilt
analysis capabilities, you can determine the stress, strain, deformed shape, and
displacement of components under operation, thereby avoiding field failures.
This tool can quickly identify weaknesses in the initial design. You can
generate new computer models quickly and inexpensively to solve problems that
would otherwise not be discovered until the testing phase or, worse yet, in the
customers plant. By determining the exact duty cycle of components, you can use
lighter-duty parts or remove unnecessary material to reduce the cost and weight
of the machine.
Assembly and Testing
As the design is generated, 3D CAD software automatically maintains the bill
of materials, and can export it as an excel spreadsheet or in other formats for
import into your material requirements planning (MRP) system. This information
will save time and help you to avoid errors during the purchasing process. The
software tracks a wide range of information, such as the manufacturer of
purchased components, model number, size, and weight. You can generate a single
bill of materials for multiple projects with numerous parts, quantities, and
configurations in order to speed the transition to manufacturing and purchase in
greater quantities at lower prices.
Engineering changes typically occur at a rapid rate during the assembly and
testing phase. 3D CAD software now enables you to avoid costly mistakes since
changes made anywhere in the process automatically update all product
documentation, including parts, assemblies, and drawings.
By partnering with CAM companies, leading CAD companies can deliver a variety
of powerful CNC programming solutions for milling, turning, and electronic
discharge machining. Certified CAM solutions read native CAD geometry and are
fully associative, ensuring that design changes are reflected in the CNC
program.
Project Documentation
With 2D CAD tools, you end up spending a lot of time recreating portions of
the design in order to document the machine. But with industry benchmarking 3D
CAD software, you can easily use the 3D assembly to quickly create production
level 2D drawings. By simply drawing a line, you can create section views. Then
the software will section the assembly and automatically produce the drawing.
You can quickly create exploded views that describe how to maintain the machine
by first arranging components in 3D, and then selecting areas of interest to
define 2D detailed drawing views. Plus, you can easily annotate these views with
balloons that are keyed to the bill of materials to highlight components of
interest.
eDrawings software allows you to distribute 2D and 3D drawings to customers
or others who can view them without having to install any software. With
eDrawings, machine designers can securely show their drawings to customers and
suppliers without revealing sensitive design data. Recipients are able to view
and interrogate the drawings with enough detail to quickly understand any
machine maintenance instructions.
Inbuilt animation capabilities go one step further by providing the ability
to create animations easily from parts and assembly models. The software
captures assembly motion to demonstrate how the moving parts of the packaging
machine operate. You can explode or collapse the assembly to show how it fits
together. You can fly the animation around the machine or sub-system, or revolve
it 360 degrees on a turntable to view it from every angle. When you need to
deliver maintenance documentation to your customers, both animation and eDrawing
capabilities will provide the required added value.
Ved Narayan
The author is vice president, Asia Pacific, SolidWorks
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in
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