Chinese design engineers are pushing plastics tolerances on new designs of GM vehicles, such as the Buick LaCrosse. The rapidly growing GM design center near Shanghai recently proposed reduction of an interior fit line line from two to one millimeter, for example, raising objections from design chiefs in Detroit. Because of the enormous success of the Chinese-designed version of the LaCrosse, the GM Chinese designers have a lot of swagger right now. Size of the staff has mushroomed from 23 six years ago to more than 100 now, and they are now given the lead on some global design projects. And these aren’t U.S. transplant designers. They are all Chinese, except one, according to a recent feature article in Fast Company magazine. Does this portend a major thrust for products designed in China? Why not? China is now the second biggest market in the world for many products, and probably will be number one some day. Chinese nationals flood the best science and engineering programs in the Western World. They are smart and eager to learn. And their tremendous work on the LaCrosse shows that they earn their place at the table the old-fashioned way.
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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