Importance of Product Design in Fabrication Industry





Innovation is all about delivering more with less, making things better, viewing it from the user’s perspective and creating products that are user friendly. Products should be designed by incorporating not just end goal, but also by considering other affecting factors like environment for instance. To bring in innovation in products, manufacturers today are compelled to design products in such a manner that the users are satisfied by newly introduced products, even if they are merely a modification or upgradation of existing ones.

Why do manufacturing and design engineer emphasis on it?

Mechanical fabrication industry has concentrated on upgradation, along with introduction of completely new products. This calls for enhancing the designs of the product and serve the users its very purpose.

With emerging markets, manufacturers demand the components design consistency in real world and design engineers ensure safety validated designs. However, physical tests for each component is quiet impractical and costly which eventually fall short of meeting market demands.

This barrier can be removed entirely through the utilization of 3D CAD models for performing virtual tests using techniques like CFD and FEA. These techniques enables the engineers to quickly assess the product for its sustainability and strength, before even performing the first physical test trial. The use of 3D CAD models further aids in bridging the gap between conceptual designs and manufacturing-ready product, as it requires design engineers to convert rough sketches to manufacturing and fabrication drawings considering the tooling capabilities that will be used to give final shape to the conceptual idea.

Product Design benefits in Industry

Product designing has valued importance in the fabrication industry since most of the post-designing tasks are based on the design development. To fabricate any product, fabrication drawings are a must, which are often extracted from initial design data and 3D CAD models. Thus, designing holds the most crucial card in entire cycle of product evolution to sales.

In addition to manufacturing requirement, product designs also play a vital role in sales that largely depend on ergonomics, how well the design communicates with the customer and allows them to review to the features and functions. When these products designed in CAD software are rendered, it develops design intent clarity between the designers and its end user. Rendering makes the products to come alive, helping to boost sales and further to be utilized directly for marketing, during commercialization of the product. With CAD models, not just designing, but several other attributes related to product fabrication, costs, time duration and materials requirement also becomes available.

Some of the benefits of product design that have impacted the industry directly are listed below:

Ease in redesigning and including changes

Reduced manufacturing time

Comprehensive design detailing and accurate dimensioning

Inclusion of Bill of Materials, materials requirement and other need regarding product

Ease in manufacturing

Enhanced productivity and accurate output

Being able to recycle the material, use of more compatible material and providing sufficient design allowances and thereby creating a sustainable design.

A case in study

At Hi-Tech, we helped our client realize these benefits by developing detailed 3D models, assembly and fabrication drawings for water blasting system. The client had sent his drawings in non-editable format, which also included rough sketches. These sketches were converted to 3D CAD models, to develop detailed assembly of the entire blasting system.

The team at Hi-Tech delivered the assembly with accurate design dimensions and created the 3D model along with fabrication drawings for manufacturing. The entire system was redesigned with accurate Bill of Materials – BOM. This helped the client in reducing 40% manufacturing time because of detailed design along with consistent and accurate dimensioning. Also, the changes in the design were incorporated for assembly as well as for component design.



About Author:

Kashyap Vyas is an Engineer at Hi-Tech and holds a Master’s degree in Thermal Engineering with several research papers to his credit. He covers CAD and CAE topics for the engineering industry. His contributions are primarily focused on encouraging manufacturers and suppliers to adopt virtual product development tools to build efficient products with reduced time-to-market.

