Does this sound familiar? It’s late at night, but the engineer is still hard at work. Shoulders hunched over his keyboard, staring at a CAD model of a hand-held electric drill. Before meshing the designer’s model he wants to simplify it. He has the designer’s native CAD le and software, but he’s still struggling. He tries to remove some llets, but the model regeneration fails. He tries to delete the air vents for the motor—same result. He can’t gure out why. Finally he gives up and goes home. The next day he calls the designer to ask him to make the changes. He leaves a message—no response. He tries back after lunch—no answer. Finally, at the end of the day, he reaches the designer, who promises to make the changes and resend the model. The next morning, the engineer opens the new model only to nd that the designer deleted the air vents but not the llets—and the whole process repeats. Days go by, time is wasted, and everyone is frustrated. Similar situations occur throughout product development. Some people try to use the 3D design model. Others don’t even try—they just use the 2D drawings. It’s all so unproductive, and unnecessary. What if everyone involved in bringing a product to market could work and communicate in 3D? This paper examines the growing trend of enabling 3D technology for mechanical design, beginning with an exploration of why 3D modeling has, until now, been widely adopted only by product designers. Next, this paper shows—by studying specic examples of 3D use in manufacturing, analysis, conceptual design, and design review—how 3D has been unleashed for the benet of everyone involved in product design. Finally, this paper identies several key features essential to any 3D tool for engineers who want to increase their personal productivity.

The Limited Role of 3D Modeling in Product Development

3D CAD systems have transformed product development within manufacturing companies, but they remain the domain of specialists—those dedicated CAD experts who understand the nuances of parametric solid modeling systems. The majority of you involved with product realization don’t have the time to master the product designer’s CAD tool, limiting your participation in a more fully automated product design process.Consider the automotive die industrial caster who uses a 3D modeler to review early design models for improved product manufacturability. In the ‘old days’, he relied on paper drawings and redlines. Without sucient time to learn the designer’s CAD system, his input was manual, intrinsically lessened by the 2D medium it was tied to. Now his review is done in the context of the design itself: he updates the model—increasing the wall thickness around a core, for instance—and then sends the revised and annotated model back to the designer.But most participants in the product development process still have one foot in the ‘old days’. Concept design, manufacturing, analysis, QA, and others sing a common refrain—they want the benets of 3D. They know it would enhance product development and improve their own productivity to boot. So if everyone wants 3D, why hasn’t it been widely adopted? To get at that, let’s drill down into who’s using it and who isn’t. 3D Rising: Engineers harnessing the full power of 3D

2 Introduction