Competitive environment pushes companies to provide innovative products faster than ever and with high reliability. A key focus in product design is saving time and money without sacrificing quality. But, fast is not always reliable. The cost of fixing flaws grows exponentially through the product design cycle. Identifying and fixing product design flaws early in the design cycle is especially critical. Thus, companies should concentrate on effective ways of products design already at early stages.
R&D activities are the earliest and the most critical stage in product design cycle that dictates final product performance, functionality, and price. At this stage all the responsibility falls on R&D scientists’, engineers’ and managers’ shoulders. They need to decide on a technological road-map that will define required “what to do” actions, and timeline.
The technological roadmap always came with “what if?” uncertainty and requires substantial research on various scientific approaches, geometries, and materials. Therefore, to relying solely on physical testing of different proof-of-concept studies is expensive and time consuming. To overcome this obstacle simulations and virtual prototyping is widely used and allows to test hundreds and even thousands variations.
The most common field of virtual prototyping and simulations is engineering: mechanics, flow design, heat transfer, and printed circuits. At the same time simulation and virtual prototyping in more scientific areas where coupling between different fields of Physics and material properties required is less common. This type of simulation is called Multiphysics simulations and allows predicting accurately physical behavior of a real system without performing any experiment. This is of particular importance where the experiments would be difficult, time consuming and expensive. For example, this type of simulations can be essential in ultrasonic and microfluidic devices—where size leads to expensive testing of physical prototypes.
An ability to test different multiphysical approaches, geometries, materials and optimize over all prototype/proof-of-concept components significantly speeds up the development process and reduces design flaws.
In the next article I will describe a case study on how simulations and virtual prototyping may accelerate your R&D activities.