Tools Design, Process Planning and Digital Mock-up

Manufacturers are increasingly using light weight and ultrahigh strength materials, bio-materials, composites, engineered honey-comb and sandwich materials in an effort to reduce component weight, cost and manufacturing requirements, environmental impacts and improve functional performances. The production of parts in such new materials involves knowledge acquisition of their behaviour in the manufacturing processes. For example the injection moulding of bio-polymers involves knowledge acquisition as regards the technology, new ranges in process parameters, new mould design rules. The objective is to achieve robust processes when dealing with innovative materials in order to facilitate their transfer and dissemination into the industrial world.

More and more the delivery of tools integrates a guarantee. The current approach is based on over-dimension principles tacitly applied to support the safety of the tool producer, resulting in augmented costs without the correspondent perceived value by the client. Knowledge regarding the reliability of tools and its materialization in reliability models and design for reliability rules are required. Tools reliability management system include feedback loops to retrieve information regarding the performance of tools from their in-production life phase (Field/Service Engineering) to the design office, in order to continuously evaluate and improve the reliability of existing engineering solutions. Technologies, methods and algorithms for tooling condition monitoring and data collection, data mining, pattern recognition, decision-making, etc., are needed to improve process stability, tools reliability and quality control.

Intelligent tooling involves a merging of mechanical and electronic domains (sensors and actuators are built in the tool to support specific functions). The intelligent tool should be able to monitor and even control the production process in real time, allowing automatic quality assurance, product and process fault detection, tools condition analysis for preventive maintenance, historical operational conditions surveillance, etc. This research area targets the automated process monitoring and control (the conceptual model, the hard and soft components) built in intelligent tools and engages suitable integration of micro sensors & actuators devices and the development of analysis, control and decision algorithms for intelligent and adaptive processes.

The development of integrated systems designed to allow a complete virtual manufacturing and production start-up (moulds&dies design and production, part production processes, machine interfaces, automation systems, etc) contributes to achieve a pro-active and first-time right production launch. This calls for the combination of several scientific and technological areas, namely:

• (1) Intelligent and virtual manufacturing systems -- development of systems integrating design, process and production planning, involving planning, simulation and analysis, part programming and process simulation, under a virtual environment. Besides consider the processes within tools production, the ability to simulate and analyse production processes should also focus tool-user technologies to support the production start-up of final parts (produce right the first time with minimal ramp-up time)
• (2)Knowledge based engineering systems for tooling design and testing – development of integrated knowledge based software tools able to generate engineering solutions, considering the whole tool process/life cycle, with learning capabilities and allowing the capture of knowledge from experience.