This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project supports the research into new techniques and algorithms for geometric manufacturability feedback that are expected to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements in speed over existing approaches. The proposed algorithms will exploit the ability of graphics processing units (GPUs) on standard PCs to act as parallel co-processors, thus providing continuous, real-time manufacturability feedback to designers. A main focus will be on accessibility analysis for molding and casting. The PI will design and implement real-time algorithms that analyze part geometry, identifying features that increase cost and reduce quality, and guiding the designer towards better alternatives. The integrated education plan will draw upon this work to development CAD plug-ins for manufacturability feedback and virtual reality (VR) manufacturing video games for undergraduate education and K-12 outreach, and will also feature the development of a graduate course on GPU programming applied to mechanical design and manufacturing.
If successful, for industry, this project has the potential to reduce time to market and lower cost through improved manufacturing feedback to designers. Today's product designers have less first-hand experience with the manufacturing processes that will ultimately be used to realize their designs because so much manufacturing is moving offshore; incorporating manufacturing expertise into design software as proposed in this project will help preserve the competitiveness of domestic engineering design. For education and outreach, the plug-ins and VR video games will simultaneously improve students' spatial reasoning skills and awareness of Design For Manufacturing principles and "green" considerations of energy and water use. The new graduate course will introduce interdisciplinary approaches to geometric design and manufacturing. The demonstration of the potential of GPU-accelerated algorithms to dramatically improve the speed of manufacturability calculations could radically alter the ways in which Computer Aided Design, Computer Aided Manufacturing, and Computer Aided Engineering systems are built.
