The Digital Prototyping Solution & Autodesk

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Autodesk & Digital PrototypingDigital Prototyping is Autodesk’s solution for prototype testing in the manufacturing realm. The idea is that you can create a digital prototype of your product that can be manipulated and tested without ever having to create a physical version of it. The obvious benefits of something like this are cost-savings, time-savings, and precise mathematical calculations based on computational algorithms.

Digital Prototyping brings together design data from all phases of the product development process into a single digital model in Inventor. This model can then be manipulated in many ways to test certain aspects of the model that would normally be handled with a physical prototype. Things such as stress analysis can be handled in Inventor. Or, you can bring your prototype into a Revit model to see how it will fit into a factory setting. You could bring the prototype into Showcase and modify the aesthetic appeal of the design and determine what looks best. Using Digital Prototyping allows you to test every aspect of your design before you ever put a single physical copy into production. This saves time, money, and it allows you to catch any errors or flaws in your design before it even touches the manufacturing floor. All of this ensures that your product will be top-notch before it reaches your customers.

I found an excellent video that describes each and every step of the Digital Prototyping workflow as well as what software satisfies each function. It’s close to 12 minutes long but it’s worth the watch. Check it out.

You can see exactly which products do what for the digital prototyping workflow. This video gives you a great idea of how efficient and useful this software is when you bring it all together a single design. There are a lot of Autodesk products that support the Digital Prototyping workflow: Autodesk Product Design Suite, Autodesk Inventor, AutoCAD, AutoCAD Electrical, AutoCAD Mechanical, 3DS Max Design, Autodesk Simulation Multiphysics, Autodesk Alias Design, Inventor Publisher, Autodesk Factory Design Suite, Moldflow, Showcase, Vault, and Sketchbook Designer.

For commercial industries, the benefits of Digital Prototyping are obvious. For education, some people may not completely see the benefit. But consider this; Autodesk is the industry-standard in the design and manufacturing industry. What better way to prepare high school or college-level students for the business world than by utilizing Digital Prototyping in your manufacturing curriculum? If the private sector is utilizing Autodesk’s tools for digital prototyping, then your students will need to be familiar with this workflow if they want to secure a job and be as efficient as possible in the commercial realm. Not to mention digital prototyping encourages students to work as a team to design, test, and manufacture a working product just as they would in the real world.

Digital Prototyping will encourage students to come up with unique and ambitious designs and it will allow multiple ideas from multiple people to come together into one final design that is fully functional. As an educator, this is a great workflow to begin teaching to your students to better prepare them for the real world.  Read some more about digital prototyping here and here.

Author: Mark Philipp

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