Virtual Process Engineering – An approach to integrate VR, FEM, and simulation tools in the manufacturing chain

Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology IPT, Department Process Technology, Steinbachstrasse 17, 52074 Aachen, Germany

Corresponding author: andreas.straube@ipt.fraunhofer.de

Received: 30 June 2003
Accepted: 20 October 2003

Abstract

Today's businesses continually search for ways to increase productivity. To achieve this goal, shorter product development cycles and shorter manufacturing times are required. In both cases, problems that may arise during development must be identified much faster. In product development, this is done using virtual prototypes that can be easily duplicated and shared between everyone involved. In addition to this product design process, the stability of the manufacturing process and the resulting product quality ultimately determine the product's profitability. Therefore the manufacturing concepts of a new product can best be demonstrated using Virtual Manufacturing. The subset of Virtual Manufacturing where material properties of the product and machine tools and the physics of the process are investigated is called Virtual Process Engineering. Virtual Process Engineering utilizes Finite Element Methods (FEM) and simulations for the computation of the manufacturing process and Virtual Reality (VR) for quick and intuitive examination of the computation results.