Collaborative engineering and design automation for advanced materials implementation in railway supply industry.

Merticaru, Vasile, Jr. ; Recio Perero, Pablo ; Carausu, Constantin 等

1. INTRODUCTION

In the nowadays context of the European Union economy, there can be predicted that the Romanian railway industry will experience an important renovation and the products manufactured in the railway supply industry will have to align to the European requirements. One of the main issues in this sense is represented by the need to replace some classical steel structures with new material solutions, such as aluminium alloys, having better characteristics and a lot of advantages in use. In these conditions, the specialists from railway manufacturing industry and from the research centers from universities can assume time consuming tasks such as new product solutions' conceiving, execution of drawings and technical documentation, conception of the products' aesthetics and ergonomics, simulation of the products behavior through FEM (Finite Element Method), generation and testing of the manufacturing technologies.

2. ENGINEERING REFERENCE

As engineering reference, the Spanish railway industry was chosen to be subjected to study, because at the present time, the railway sector is experiencing also in Spain an important renovation that comes bound up with the strong increase of the demand of transportation due to a couple of clearly identifiable phenomena: the phenomenon of the people from the big cities, changing their houses toward their metropolitan areas, and the necessity of daily traveling; the search for a viable alternative to the air transportation, for not very long distances (Guillen-Carames et al., 2007). Therefore, there have been clearly identified two different directions of growth in the Spanish railway sector: the proximities transportation and the high-speed transportation. There has been noticed that administration actors which have the responsibility of offering public transportation services mostly chose to invest in a type of infrastructures that despite of being expensive and difficultly profitable, bring as a result a better interconnection among urban cores moderately distanced and between the center and the periphery of the big cities and, consequently, an improvement in the flows of people and goods that finish in determining the growth and enabling of the economic activities, mainly due to the great capacity of transportation, such as for passengers' volumes, very superior to that of the highways, to the competitive times of travel that can be obtained, and to their environmental smallest impact. Considering the new works and investments mainly in the high-speed railway transportation and in the urban and proximity transportation of the main metropolitan areas of Spain, the forecasts show that the demand volume of railway material and products will be very important in the next period, bringing serious difficulties of adaptation for the big productive companies in the field (Recio-Perero, 2008).

On the other hand, at the present time, about 80% of the orders that the administrations of the European railway sectors are launching, stipulate in the corresponding sheets of specifications the requirement that the structure must be manufactured in aluminum alloy. Lately, the aluminum has consolidated as a clear alternative to the steel in the production of boxes of railway vehicles. In the high-speed railway transportation segment, the aluminum is used in 100% of the cases. In tram and metropolitan transportation segments, the aluminum is located around 90%, while in regional and suburban train it descends around 60%. Anyway, also in the suburban trains, mainly when speaking of electric traction, the aluminum overcomes a lot over the steel in the orders of railway material during the last years (Recio-Perero, 2008).

In relation to the new visions upon Concurrent Engineering (Kusiak 1992) and upon Integrated Engineering (Usher et al., 2005), respectively upon concepts and systems as CIM (Computer Integrated manufacturing) (Singh 1995), CIE (Computer Integrated Enterprise) or CII (Computer Integrated Industry), the main advantages brought by a system of product information management, respectively by a PDM or PLM solution, in the new product development are: the time for realizing a new product (Time to market) is reduced; the productivity of the design/calculation process is improved; the design and manufacturing accuracy is improved; an innovative content of the products is determined; data security is provided; a better control upon changes is provided. In the environment of PDM/PLM, cPD (Collaborative Product Development) begins the first phase of the new product's lifecycle (Ausura & Deck 2003) and, as initial stage, it is an approach which intend capturing, organizing, coordinating and controlling all the information related to the new product development, including all the functional requirements, geometry, specifications, characteristics and manufacturing processes, for providing a shared common view upon the development of the product to accomplish the requirements and for creating a unique vault of product information accessible throughout the product entire lifecycle.

3. OBJECTIVES, METHODS & INSTRUMENTS

The reason that directed the decision towards the design of a product assembled by welding of big and medium aluminum structures has been represented by the increased impact and use that this material is having in diverse sectors of the industry, but with special emphasis in the European railway sectors.

The group of products that has been chosen as subject of the case study for the collaborative product development is represented by the back headboard of a modern suburban train. The headboard is the assembly that represents the mechanical interface between the railway carriage's structure and the coupling elements. The coupling elements are the mechanical elements whose function is to provide the joint between railway carriages.

The studied back headboard, as well as the rest of the components that constitute the structure of a railway vehicle, is usually manufactured starting from plates of medium or big thickness, cut at stipulated dimensions and then joined by welding.

In the case of aluminum structures, one of the big advantages is the possibility of using profiled bars extruded in cold conditions. The aluminum profiles give the possibility to build a structure more optimized in relation to the mechanical efforts the structure is subjected to.

Considering the experience in the CAD area of the authors and of their collaborators from the universities and from Romanian industrial partners, AutoCAD-2007 and SolidWorks-2007 have been chosen as CAD instruments and PDM-Works have been chosen as product data management instrument in the collaborative engineering activities.

4. RESULTS OF COLLABORATIVE CAD

The above mentioned headboard, designed in collaborative manner, is formed of 26 parts and an example of CAD result for this product is shown in Fig. 1. For the above presented reasons, all the parts in the designed assembly were stipulated to be manufactured of Anticorodal-110, which is a medium strength aluminum alloy with Mg and Si, having good machine-ability, excellent corrosion resistance in inland atmosphere and excellent TIG/MAG weld-ability.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

For the assembly product subjected to the case study, also the manufacturing technical documentation was elaborated, the above mentioned CAD instruments being used in this stage for elaborating the technological schemes for parts positioning and the details working schemes for each welding phase and operation in the assembling process route.

In Fig. 2, there is exemplified such a technological scheme for parts positioning for welding operations.

In Fig. 3, there is exemplified one technological detailed scheme for welding operations.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

5. CONCLUSION

An application of collaborative engineering, respectively of product development, using CAD instruments into a PDM environment is presented in the paper. So, the paper proposes a collaborative methodology for developing some type projects, specific to the machine manufacturing industry. A case study is described in the paper, referring to the CAD activities developed for an assembly product for railway industry, made of aluminum alloys and designed to be assembled by welding operations. The proposed development manner of such type projects consists in the realization, by the collaborative partners and using CAD software, of parts from the product, in making information exchange and in realizing assemblies by working on the network, in realization of the technical changes imposed by the product design (shapes, colors, presentation materials), in simulation of the loading conditions using FEM, in development of the manufacturing technologies for the complex parts in the project and is intended to be extended in the research centers from universities and at industrial partners.

6. REFERENCES

Ausura, B. & Deck, M. (2003). The "new" Product Lifecycle Management systems: What are these PLM systems? And how can they help your company do NPD better? Available from: http://www.pdma.org/visions/jan03/plm.html, Accessed: 2007-12-12.

Guillen-Carames, J. et al. (2007). El regimen juridico del sector ferroviario en Espana (The legal regime of the railway sector in Spain), Thomson-Aranzadi, ISBN 978-84-8355-197-4, Madrid.

Kusiak, A. (1992). Concurrent Engineering: Automation, Tools, and Techniques, John Wiley & Sons Inc., ISBN: 978-0-471-55492-9, New York.

Recio-Perero, P. (2008). Train Carriage System Joint Factory Final project (coordinator V. Merticaru jr.), Universidad de Valladolid-Spain & Technical University "Gh. Asachi" of Iasi-Romania.

Singh, N. (1995), Systems Approach to Computer-Integrated Design and Manufacturing, John Wiley & Sons Inc., ISBN: 978-0-471-58517-6, New York.

Usher, J. M.; Roy, U. & Parsaei, H. (2005), Integrated Product and Process Development: Methods, Tools, and Technologies, John Wiley & Sons Inc., ISBN: 978-0-471-15597-3, New York.