DSSP inside industry

While projects such as the Discovery mission and digital recreation of the Statue of Liberty provide high visibility, DSSP has made its greatest impact in the day-to-day work within major industries.

Quietly and decisively, DSSP has become a major tool in helping automotive companies and their suppliers speed product design and improve quality. One major automaker has used DSSP to reduce NURBS surfacing time for complex objects such as engine and transmission housings by as much as 80 percent. The resulting models, generated from as-built parts rather than original CAD models that might no longer closely represent the manufactured parts, are used for faster, more accurate FEA and CFD analysis.

A luxury car manufacturer whose brand is defined by quality says that DSSP has “opened a whole new world.” Inspection is faster, enabling suppliers to deliver parts in less time. Design engineers have better information about the quality of specific individual parts, saving the company money, improving processes, and producing a better end product for consumers.

Leading turbine companies use DSSP to perform a 100-percent dimensional inspection for each new part of their highly complex products. The process involves verifying every feature on the part and comparing it to a customer-supplied part print or a 3D CAD model. DSSP enables turbine companies to do a more thorough inspection of complex parts in less time. The ease-of-use of both the hardware and software makes results easier to analyze and share, saving time and money.

In aerospace, DSSP has enabled American Blimp to simultaneously increase quality and reduce the cost of manufacturing fan blades by 88 percent. Aerospace supplier AMT has used DSSP to cut first-article inspection time in half and to develop a library of 200 different part inspection profiles.

Schneider Electric, a leading manufacturer of electrical power and control assemblies, uses DSSP across 206 manufacturing operations in 130 countries for first and last article inspection, tool validation, and functional forensics. Rus Emerick, the company’s computer-aided inspection guru, calls the company’s DSSP strategy “design anywhere, build anywhere, qualify anywhere.” He estimates that first-article inspection with Geomagic software can save up to two weeks in time and $51,000 in costs for a single part.

Enabling mass customization

One of the most promising aspects of DSSP is its ability to enable mass customization – manufacturing one-of-a-kind products with the same efficiency and cost-effectiveness as mass production of one-size-fits-all goods. Mass customization is already a huge market differentiator in the medical device industry, where fitting a product to the unique shapes of the human body is increasingly critical to success.

GN ReSound is using DSSP for faster, more accurate digital manufacturing of customized hearing instrument shells. The company sees DSSP as a central tool in reaching its ultimate goal: designing products attractive enough for 80 percent of the people who need a hearing instrument, but refuse to buy one for aesthetic, comfort or cost reasons.

In the orthodontics field, Ormco is taking advantage of DSSP to create a new line of orthodontic devices that are fitted exactly to patients’ teeth and accurately match occlusal bite surfaces. Not only will the new devices achieve faster treatment results, DSSP will enable orthodontists to use 3D visualization to show patients each step of the treatment and the expected results in advance.

It doesn’t take much to realize the appeal this kind of mass customization holds for consumer products. Apple’s iPod is the perfect example – it provides a digital vessel for its users to fill with content that has personal meaning. Design and color options, along with an endless number of skins and peripheral items, help further ensure that iPod owners are making an individual statement. The same trends can be found in the proliferation of automobile styles and options, in clothing and accessories, and even furniture, where one can mix and match thousands of fabrics to create a one-of-a-kind sofa or chair.

In addition to establishing strong brand identity, vendors of products defined by unique design and individualization can often shield themselves from the price pressures faced by purveyors of commodity products. In many cases, they manufacture close to their customer base. Perhaps best of all, they can be nimble – taking consumer input and quickly transforming it into a product that meets market demands.

DSSP is ideally suited to the customized design and individualized services that are reshaping how products are developed and marketed. Advances in DSSP hold the promise of delivering the most demanding manufacturing processes to anyone at anytime and anywhere.

The revolution – now in 3D

Companies adopting DSSP technology are shifting the business paradigm from manufacturing-centric production to consumer-centric customization. The revolutions in one- and two-dimensional worlds are now being repeated in the three-dimensional domain. In the one-dimensional realm, the step from analog to digital signals greatly expanded the capacity of phone, music and other forms of communication. In the two-dimensional realm, the leap from typewriter to word and image processing forever changed how information is expressed and disseminated.

With DSSP, we now have the ability to digitize physical objects in their true forms, including the wear and tear that they receive in everyday use or even damage incurred during a space mission. DSSP offers an effective new way of processing limitless shapes for everything that exists. It frees designers, engineers and manufacturers from two decades of limitations proliferated by the blank-screen design of CAD systems, providing the ability to go beyond mainly mechanical shapes to model an endless variety of organic shapes.

The beauty of DSSP is that it enables us to capture, recreate, assess and inspect almost anything, since all shapes are just points with associated geometry. That makes it possible to recreate any existing physical object, not just legacy engine parts for the aerospace and automotive industries, but also human body parts for individually designed apparel, shoes or medical devices. Not only are the possibilities nearly endless, but timeless as well – the point data captured today and converted to 3D shape data will still be usable 50 years down the road.

Ping Fu is president and CEO of Geomagic. Geomagic simplifies digital shape sampling and processing (DSSP), enabling customers to accelerate their design-build cycles, ensure quality at every step of product development, and continuously improve products over their life cycles. More than 5,000 professionals in industries such as automotive, aerospace, medical devices and consumer products depend on Geomagic software.