Digital prototyping

Not to be confused with Rapid prototyping.

Digital Prototyping gives conceptual design, engineering, manufacturing, and sales and marketing departments the ability to virtually explore a complete product before it's built. Industrial designers, manufacturers, and engineers use Digital Prototyping to design, iterate, optimize, validate, and visualize their products digitally throughout the product development process. Innovative digital prototypes can be created via CAutoD through intelligent and near-optimal iterations, meeting multiple design objectives (such as maximised output, energy efficiency, highest speed and cost-effectiveness), identifying multiple figures of merit, and reducing development gearing and time-to-market. Marketers also use Digital Prototyping to create photorealistic renderings and animations of products prior to manufacturing. Companies often adopt Digital Prototyping with the goal of improving communication between product development stakeholders, getting products to market faster, and facilitating product innovation.

Digital Prototyping goes beyond simply creating product designs in 3D. It gives product development teams a way to assess the operation of moving parts, to determine whether or not the product will fail, and see how the various product components interact with subsystems—either pneumatic or electric. By simulating and validating the real-world performance of a product design digitally, manufacturers often can reduce the number of physical prototypes they need to create before a product can be manufactured, reducing the cost and time needed for physical prototyping.[1] Many companies use Digital Prototyping in place of, or as a complement to, physical prototyping.[2]

Digital Prototyping changes the traditional product development cycle from design>build>test>fix to design>analyze>test>build.[3] Instead of needing to build multiple physical prototypes and then testing them to see if they'll work, companies can conduct testing digitally throughout the process by using Digital Prototyping, reducing the number of physical prototypes needed to validate the design. Studies show that by using Digital Prototyping to catch design problems up front, manufacturers experience fewer change orders downstream.[4] Because the geometry in digital prototypes is highly accurate, companies can check interferences to avoid assembly issues that generate change orders in the testing and manufacturing phases of development.[5] Companies can also perform simulations in early stages of the product development cycle, so they avoid failure modes during testing or manufacturing phases. With a Digital Prototyping approach, companies can digitally test a broader range of their product's performance.[5] They can also test design iterations quickly to assess whether they're over- or under-designing components.

Research from the Aberdeen Group shows that manufacturers that use Digital Prototyping build half the number of physical prototypes as the average manufacturer, get to market 58 days faster than average, and experience 48 percent lower prototyping costs.[6]

  1. ^ Aberdeen Group, “The Transition from 2D Drafting to 3D Modeling Benchmark Report,” September 2006, p. 6.
  2. ^ "Ideenmanagement Software" (in German). Ivan Jovic. Archived from the original on 2015-11-15. Retrieved June 3, 2020.
  3. ^ Jeff Rowe, “Virtual Reality,” Cadalyst, March 2, 2006.
  4. ^ Aberdeen Group, “The Transition from 2D Drafting to 3D Modeling Benchmark Report,” September 2006, p. 7.
  5. ^ a b Aberdeen Group, “Complementary Digital and Physical Prototyping Strategies: Avoiding the Product Development Crunch,” February 2008, p. 11.
  6. ^ Aberdeen Group, “The Transition from 2D Drafting to 3D Modeling Benchmark Report,” September 2006.