Virtual Prototyping for Rapid Product Development

Intensifying globalization and market competition has been driving the manufacturing industry to compete on continual reduction in lead-time and cost of product development while assuring high quality and wide varieties. Conventional manufacturing processes are, however, no longer sufficient to speed up product development to meet ever-increasing diversities of customer demands, stringent cost control, and complexity of new products. In recent years, various technologies have been developed to facilitate rapid product development. Among these technologies, virtual prototyping (VP) and virtual manufacturing (VM) may be regarded as important technological advancements. VP and VM integrate virtual reality (VR) simulation techniques with design and manufacturing processes to fabricate digital prototypes for subsequent stereoscopic visualisation, validation and optimisation of product designs, as well as for evaluation of product assemblability and producability. As shown in Figure 1, VP and VM together close a design-simulate-improve loop, in which design and production simulation techniques are integrated for visualisation and optimisation of a complete product development process in a VR environment to enhance product maturity. While VP focuses on the design process that digitally fabricates prototypes for evaluation and improvement of a product design, VM facilitates validation and optimisation of all subsequent stages of the downstream manufacturing process, such as facility layout, product assembly, and production scheduling. This design-simulate-improve loop can be iterated effectively and quickly to shorten the product design and development cycle without incurring much additional costs. Indeed, manufacturers can test all stages of product development in a virtual environment. As such, they will be able to “get it right the first time” to enhance product maturity substantially at an earlier stage, and to deliver quality products to market on time and within budget. This chapter presents an integrated VP system for digital fabrication of complex prototypes to facilitate rapid product development. The VP system comprises a suite of software packages for multi-material layered manufacturing (MMLM) processes, including multitoolpath planning, build-time estimation and accuracy analysis, integrated with semiimmersive desktop-based and full-immersive CAVE-based VR technology for digital