Names of Editor And/Or Authors and Their Organisations

ANNUAL PUBLIC REPORT

Reporting Period: 1/10/99- 30/09/2000

Contract start date: 1/10/1998 Contract termination date: 30/09/2001

Names of editor and/or authors and their organisations:

Enrico Indino - CRF

Andrea Pipino - CRF

Report Preparation Date: 24/10/2000

Report Version: 1

Classification: Public

Project Number: 28558 Project Acronym: COSMOS

Project Title:

Integrated Design Environment Enhancing Concurrent Engineering Approach in

Plastic Injection Moulds Design using Advanced 3D CAD and Simulation Systems

Project overview

Cosmos project is addressed to plastic mould makers.

Cosmos Consortium consists of five partners:

·  Centro Ricerche Fiat (CRF) located in Italy;

·  COMAU located in Italy;

·  C4W located in France;

·  Distrim2 located in Portugal;

·  Aachen, University of Technology (RWTH-IKV) located in Germany.

C4W joined Cosmos Consortium in the middle of the second year of the project overtaking KUPRON activities and responsabilities.

Second year of the project was spent to prepare the specifications for software developments and for the PDM customisation on the basis of the preliminary requirements. The new flow of activities (TO-BE process) was also prepared as an optimisation of current mould maker situation (AS-IS process). The main focus for the specifications was on big/complex moulds like the automotive ones are.

An ongoing activity for all the project is the monitoring the continuous improvements and new releases of software tools.

A first release of Quotation Cost Tool (QCT), a software for a first calculation on mould cost, is now available as a beta version.

Project objectives

As the injection moulds market increases, especially due to the increasing use of plastics in the automotive industry, time to market and cost reduction will be important aspects that mould makers must consider.

A detailed analysis of today workflow in mould maker industry has pointed out the need of specific tools with specific functionality in different departments. In particular in the project will be developed:

·  A specific CAD module for plastic mould (named MDM – Mould Design Mould);

·  Two specific cost evaluation tools (QCT – Quotation Cost Tool and PCT – Production Cost Tool);

·  A specific module for mould maker shop floor (named SFM – shop floor module);

·  Enhancement will be done in terms of CAE integration (process and mould structural analysis) and CAD-CAE integration to pass FE analysis results to the designer;

·  A customised PDM system will be set up with a new mould development workflow based on Concurrent Engineering approach and with a suitable data management from different department.

COSMOS integrated platform will be able to reach the following objectives:

·  Reduce the time-to-market;

·  Improve and facilitate Concurrent Engineering;

·  Improve the estimation of the characteristics of the products (optimal performance prediction) in shorter time.

It is expected that the application of project results will lead to a reduction in time-to-market by about 30% and cost of about 40% as compared to the traditional injection moulds design and manufacturing paradigm.

Methodology

Project work-plane consists of 4 major technical workpackages (WP) enumerates from 1 to 4. Each of them covers a particular field of research and development. A work-package has been devoted for the very important actions of dissemination and exploitation and a work-package has been devoted for management and co-ordination. It follows a brief explanation of these work-packages.

WP1: Requirements definition

The main objective is the identification of requirements of the system platform to be developed on the basis of the actual needs of mould makers developers involved in designing and manufacturing plastic injection moulding moulds of huge dimensions and complex mechanics as we have in the case of instruments panels or bumpers.

STATUS: Completed

WP2: Platform development and integration specifications:

The aim is define specifications of SW modules, STEP protocols and data exchange on the basis of requirements defined on WP1, according with the most suitable model of Concurrent Engineering approach. Data exchange format is STEP in order to obtain advantages from the wide acceptance of this standard from the major software specifications for CAD/CAE/PDM systems.

STATUS: Completed

WP3: Platform and modules implementation and testing

The aim is to develop SW modules according WP2 specifications. Concerning the data management the efforts in COSMOS are focused on the all steps, in order to store and manage by PDM all pieces of information such as 3D models in different detail levels, geometric and non-geometric data of the main components and results of analysis/simulations. This strategy is aimed to take advantages from the whole database stored and managed by PDM software.

STATUS: In progress

WP4: Test case

Cosmos platform workflow will be put into practice on a industrial environment. This physical implementation will serve as a test-bed for the demonstrator. To demonstrate the results of the COSMOS platform usage, a real mould will be designed and manufactured using the new COSMOS approach. Partial and final results will be collected and compared against the company’s historical data of previous similar moulds to evaluate savings in terms of time and costs.

STATUS: Start on January 2001

WP5: Dissemination/Exploitation:

Good dissemination of research activities means to make available to all the possibility of improve competitiveness of company interested in that field. Good exploitation strategy means to make effective this possibility. The exploitation is directed in different fields: commercial, industrial, service, university.

STATUS: In progress

WP6: Project management

The structure of project management has been organised in order to fulfil the special requirement originating from research activities developing industrial applications, but it is also a lean structure to provide efficient work. A communication strategy aims to keep all the partners fully informed about the project status, the planning and all other issues which are important in order to obtain maximum transparency for all involved and to increase synergy of the co-operation.

STATUS: In progress

Project achievements

The major results are the following:

Analysis of actual mould development workflow

An AS-IS-analysis of the development process of injection moulds is performed. This analysis represents the basis for setting up the new, optimised process. For modelling, analysis and optimisation of the process the ARIS Toolset is used.

Optimisation of the development flow

Bottlenecks and lacks in the AS-IS model were reduced through an optimisation of the flow according to specific index of efficiency come out from ARIS. New tuned tools and an high integration are the key point of this optimisation.

Plastic mould development requirements

A list of requirements to achieve a better efficiency in the mould development is reported.

These requirement mainly concern the CAD functionalities, the CAE tools (process analysis, mould structural analysis, cost analysis) the PDM adoption and the needs of integration between different tools.

Specifications for mold development tools

Specifications in terms of structure and functionality to satisfy the outcome requirements were set for all the software to be developed. PDM architecture has been prepared to fulfil the needs of concurrent engineering procedures.

Quotation Cost Tool

This software module is designed to support the calculator’s task to elaborate an offer. The pieces of information about the part (CAD-file) and the production conditions (nr. of batches per time unit, quality requirements etc.) will be considered as an input to the tool. Still, the calculator who operates the software, is indispensable for the creation of a rough sketch for the mould set-up and for the supervision of the system. The QCT is currently still under development in order to reach the desired deep interaction with the other application modules of the COSMOS-platform which are scheduled to get ready in the beginning of the third project year. Therefore the supplied software system must be considered a beta-Version.

Contacts established with other projects

An important contact has been established with GEM (ESPRIT 8894): Generic Engineering Model.

GEM project could be defined the “father” of the COSMOS project. CRF has participate to both projects. From that project the various CAE integration strategies will be taken.

Consortium is taking contacts with PACE (BRITE EURAM II BE-8037-93): Practical Approach to Concurrent Engineering. From this project the experience on C.E. approach will be taken.

Contacts with the following projects are under definition: CEDAS (ESPRIT-20501), ADCOMS (ESPRIT-22167), SEPADES (ESPRIT-6742) , CONSENS (ESPRIT-6896), CAESAR (ESPRIT-8328)

Activities related to standardisation

An important objective of the COSMOS project is to enable mould makers to implement concurrent engineering processes while maintaining their heterogeneous application software as far as possible. Therefore the integration strategy requires a maximum of neutral data exchange.

Today, the most promising data exchange standard format is STEP (standard for the exchange of product model data / ISO10303: product data representation and exchange), even though the support of STEP for some special kind of data is not taken into practice yet. Anyway, the data exchange strategy in the COSMOS platform has a clear preference to the STEP format, also in view of further developments of STEP.

Benefits to society

The general benefit is an enhancement of EU mould maker industry competitiveness; this can be reached through reduction of Time To Market, the savings of design and development cost associated with the manufacturing of new plastic components and the quality improvement of mould design and the final product.

The benefits achievable by completing this research are strictly related to the importance of the role of design phase in the industrialisation process. Nowadays industrial managers are aware that design is the main activity in an industry because about 50% of the subsequent reliability and quality problems are strictly correlated with design execution. The rapid machining techniques have reduced the time influence of manufacturing phase. The cutting down of costs is achievable also with reduction of TTM, with other connected benefits.

Information dissemination activities

An overview of the Cosmos project in its early phase was presented during the 5th ICE 99 (5th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprise) held in The Hague, The Netherlands 15th-17th March 1999.

The IKV of Aachen University booth at EuroMold exhibition in Frankfurt will present the Cosmos project with demo and screens.

A paper “Integrated Design Environment Enhancing Concurrent Engineering Approach in Plastic Injection Molds Design” was submitted and now is under evaluation at the SPE (Society of Plastic Engineers) ANTEC Conferences.

All updating and information on Cosmos project are available on Web Site at location:

http://www.distrim2.pt/COSMOS/

In this site is possible to find also a link to the Company Web Site of the partners.

References

M. Properzi, A. Pipino “Overview on COSMOS, An Integrated Design Environment for Plastic Injection Moulds”, proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising, ICE 99, pp. 309-316