CAD and PDM transform Mitsubishi MotorSports
1 min read
Mitsubishi MotorSports (MMSP) has cut development times for its Lancer Evolution World Rally Championship (WRC) cars by a full 30% while also improving design accuracy, product quality and manufacturing consistency - it was a clear front runner, said the judges.
Its achievements have come since standardising on PTC's Pro/Engineer 3D solid modelling, Wildfire collaboration tools and Pro/Intralink CAD data management system. Chief designer Paul Doe says the MMSP development team now works entirely collaboratively. It uses PTC tools for everything from development and modification of complete surface design and car components, to CAE tasks including structural and thermal simulation and FEA (finite element analysis) of highly stressed and safety-critical parts.
Says Doe: "Our main challenge is to push the limits of performance without compromising reliability, and do that quite fast. So we've been exploiting the combination of tools in Pro/Engineer. For example, we use surfacing design not only for all sorts of parts, but to create the whole body shell, which is a complex combination of body panel surfaces. For that we use the original CAD data from the production car, but significantly modify the surfaces to remove weight and improve aerodynamics. Then we merge our new design data with the original body panel data and get the transitions.
"That's a big job because you're importing thousands of surfaces and facets. It's not quite free-form surfacing, but merging everything into one overall shell is a major piece of CAD surgery. Our previous package wasn't capable of dealing with that, but Pro/Engineer has a major set of tools. It means we can create a newly designed, complete wide-track motor sport panel for our supplier to build the component almost directly from the production car data."
Pro/engineer CAE is also in action. "We've done some impressive things; one of the most complex was the crank shaft for the 2006 engine. That's subject to significant and very complicated loads and constraints so we ran a series of analyses loading the crank shaft for all the load cases. That allowed us to take 1kg of weight off the crankshaft, while still keeping it stable and reliable."
As for managing the data, Doe says: "PTC Intralink ... underpins our internal collaborative environment. We have an FTP data link into Mitsubishi Motors, but we're hoping that PTC Windchill PLM [product lifecycle management] will improve on that - managing engineering data and documents as well as all planning and communication. Then we'll be able to give suppliers access to Windchill so they can do review and mark-up online."
