Parametric design automation
Parametric design automation means writing an engineering routine down once, so that every new order is a set of inputs rather than a week of rework.
- 1.
Where it pays
The products worth automating are custom in their dimensions but fixed in their rules: tanks, vessels, boilers, frames, enclosures, ducting. If an engineer can explain the procedure at a whiteboard in ten minutes, it can be a parametric model.
The test is not whether the product is complicated. It is whether the same decisions are being made again on every order.
- 2.
What the software has to own
Automating the geometry alone moves the bottleneck rather than removing it. The documents have to come off the same model, or somebody will still be retyping numbers into a quote at eight in the evening.
- The geometry and the quantities that fall out of it
- The checks the engineer would have done by hand
- The drawing, in the format the drawing office already uses
- The bill of materials and the quote, from the same numbers
- 3.
How we work
An industrial designer who has done the job by hand writes the rules down; a systems architect builds the software and the infrastructure under it. That order matters. Most industrial software is written by people who have never stood next to the machine, and it shows in the first hour of use.
What you get at the end is a tool your own engineers open every day, not a consultancy report about a tool.
- 4.
Our own products, as evidence
WaterForm does this for bolted panel water tanks and is in commercial use. DragAero does it for external aerodynamics on macOS and is in free beta. ThermoForm does it for boilers and pressure vessels, and a demo is available.
- 5.
Starting a project
We take on a small number of outside projects alongside our own products. The first step is a conversation about what is slow: which job, how many people, how many days, and what it costs when it goes wrong.
Questions
- How long does a project like this take?
- It depends on how settled the rules are. If your engineers agree on the procedure, the first working version is a matter of weeks. If the procedure is really three procedures that nobody has reconciled, that has to happen first, and it is the valuable part.
- Do we need to change our CAD system?
- No. The output goes into the formats the drawing office already uses, DXF among them.
- Who owns the result?
- You do, for work we do for you. Our own products, WaterForm and DragAero, are licensed rather than sold.