User Manual

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CHAPTER 1 Inventor DesIgn PhIlosoPhy
Fe w e r ph y s i c a l pr o t o t y p e s
Although you may never be able to go straight from Inventor to your first article design, you can
use Inventor to reduce the number of physical prototypes needed to get there. More and more,
creating physical prototype after physical prototype is becoming a part of “the old way” of
doing things. It worked when you produced a small number of product units and had plenty of
time and resources to lend to the project. It worked when material costs were relatively low. And
it worked because it was the only available method of testing and proving a design.
In contrast, today’s competitive marketplace is unlikely to afford you the luxuries of time
and materials for repeatedly building physical prototypes, and you are expected to get a
large portion of any design right the first time around. Clearly, anything that can be done to
reduce or eliminate physical prototyping will greatly influence the financial health and com-
petitive strengths of the company you work for. This is where creating a 3D virtual prototype
becomes important.
us i n g al l t h e to o l s
Making the virtual prototype allows the designer to explore the function of a mechanism before
lengthy design and engineering time is expended on a design that just won’t work. Developing
the virtual prototype eliminates the part procurement and creation process, slashing the design
time even further. The virtual prototype can be proven further with the use of stress analysis
and dynamic motion simulation to find and correct weaknesses in the design rather than just
ensuring that everything is overbuilt and calling it a good design. Interference between compo-
nents is also easily discovered while still in the design process. The use of functional design in
the prototyping process allows engineers to properly determine loads, power, stresses, inertia,
and other properties before a machine is built. Weights, center of gravity, and other physical
characteristics are at your fingertips during any stage of the design.
mo r e t h a n Ju s t 3D
So now that you have Inventor, you are guaranteed to cut time and money from the design pro-
cess, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Over the years, as design tools have evolved, so
too have the ways we design. However, it is possible to use new design tools in the same man-
ner we used the old tools if we are not careful. As companies moved from the drafting board to
AutoCAD, many users continued to use AutoCAD in much the same way they used the board.
Not reusing data in the form of blocks and block libraries and not employing block attributes to
pack those blocks with intelligence are common examples of this.
In much the same way, it is possible to use Inventor as if it is AutoCAD. Creating 3D mod-
els simply for the sake of generating a 2D shop print is a common example of this. To ensure
that you are getting the most out of Inventor, you want to make sure your designs are more
than just 3D models. You want to use Inventor to create 3D virtual prototypes. You want to
ensure your 3D models are more than a collection of features and instead set parameters from
one feature to update based on the edits of another. You want your model to reflect the intent
of the overall design accurately, anticipating change and revision and making it as robust and
intelligent as you can.
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