accelerated.
It is good news that the time it takes to generate amould is constantly being reduced. The bad
news, on the other hand, is that even with all these advances, designing and manufacturing of the
mould can still take a long time and can be extremely expensive. Many company executives now realize how vital it is to deploy new products to market rapidly.
New products are the key to corporate prosperity. They drive corporate revenues, market shares,
bottom lines and share prices. A company able to launch good quality products with reasonable
prices ahead of their competition not only realizes 100% of the market before rival products arrive
but also tends to maintain a dominant position for a few years even after competitive products
have finally been announced (Smith, 1991). For most products, these two advantages are dramatic.
Rapid product development is now a key aspect of competitive success. Figure 2 shows that only
3–7% of the product mix from the average industrial or electronics company is less than 5 years
old. For companies in the top quartile, the number increases to 15–25%. For world-class firms,
it is 60–80% (Thompson, 1996). The best companies continuously develop new products. At
Hewlett-Packard, over 80% of the profits result from products less than 2 years old! (Neel, 1997) Figure 2. Importance of new product (Jacobs, 2000)
With the advances in computer technology and artificial intelligence, efforts have been directed to
reduce the cost and lead time in the design and manufacture of an injection mould. Injection
mould design has been the main area of interest since it is a complex process involving several
sub-designs related to various components of themould, each requiring expert knowledge and
experience. Lee et. al. (1997) proposed a systematic methodology and knowledge base for
injection mould design in a concurrent engineering environment. 4. Concurrent Engineering in Mould Design
Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to integrated product development process.
It represents team values of co-operation, trust and sharing in such a manner that decision making
is by consensus, involving all per spectives in parallel, from the very beginning of the product
life-cycle (Evans, 1998). Essentially, CE provides a collaborative, co-operative, collective and
simultaneous engineering working environment. A concurrent engineering approach is based on
five key elements:
1. process
2. multidisciplinary team
3. integrated design model
4. facility
5. software infrastructure In the plastics and mould industry, CE is very important due to the high cost tooling and long lead
times. Typically, CE is utilized by manufacturing prototype tooling early in the design phase to
analyze and adjust the design. Production tooling is manufactured as the final step. The
manufacturing process and involving moulds must be designed after passing through the
appearance evaluation and the structure optimization of the product design. CE requires an
engineer to consider the manufacturing process of the designed product in the development phase.
A good design of the product is unable to go to the market if its manufacturing process is
impossible. Integration of process simulation and rapid prototyping and manufacturing can reduce
the risk associated with moving from CAD to CAM and further enhance the validity of the
product development.
For years, designers have been restricted in what they can produce as they generally have to
design for manufacture (DFM) – that is, adjust their design intent to enable the component (or 塑料注塑模具并行设计英文文献和翻译(3):http://www.youerw.com/fanyi/lunwen_474.html