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In the words of Phil Sholl, managing director of AMTRI, formerly the Advanced Machine Tool Research Institute: “You cannot design a component without thinking about how you are going to make it.” At least you can, and engineers all too often do, but it’s extremely foolish. In short, it is not enough to design it, nor even to design it and then think about how it is going to be made. Engineers need to model the making of the part to see that it is feasible. Nothing new, and CAM (computer aided manufacturing) packages have had this facility for years, while wire frame simulation of machining has gradually given way to rendered solid models. However, such simulations all assume that everything is going to run perfectly, and there are many manufacturing processes that until now could not be modelled at all.
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