At the soul of Detroit Engineered Products (DEP) is a passion for engineering and transforming the product development process associated with vehicle and powertrain systems. DEP reinforces its capabilities- right from concept to production – spanning across products, processes and services, which are customized to drastically reduce overall product development cycle for customers, enabling them to cut costs, accelerate time to market, and deliver optimized and balanced products to their customers.
Manufacturing Today spoke with Basant Sharma, the Vice President at Detroit Engineered Product, who has been a key contributor to the company’s significant growth in the past 15 years. Basant is responsible for the growth of DEP in US and India Markets for Engineering Services.
Could you tell us more about Detroit Engineered Products (DEP)?
Detroit Engineered Products (DEP) is an engineering services, product development, software development and talent acquisition company. Since its inception in 1998 in Troy, Michigan, USA, DEP is now a global company with footprints in Europe, China, Korea, Japan, Canada and India.
We use the accelerated and transformed product development process, accomplished by utilizing our proprietary CAE platform, DEP MeshWorks, which rapidly reduces the development time of products for all segments across industries like Automotive, Aerospace, Defense, Biomedical, Energy, Electronics, Oil & Gas, Consumer Products, Heavy Equipment etc.
Our engineering capabilities – right from concept to production- spanning across products, processes and services are customized to drastically reduce the overall product development cycle for our customers, enabling them to cut costs, accelerate time to market, and deliver optimized and balanced products.
What is Aerodynamic Design Through Virtual Validation? How does it play a crucial role in ensuring the safety and precision of aircraft design?
The first priority of aircraft designers in the aerospace industry in undoubtedly safety. With the help of virtual validation, companies can test designs before investing in prototypes and make sure the products are safe and reliable beforehand. Virtual validation essentially gives a simulated environment where engineers can run multiple tests to ensure the validity and security of their products before physically building them. The virtual validation process provides engineers and product designers a comprehensive 3D visualization of a part or product in CAD and CAE. With the need to build prototypes for testing eliminated, engineers have the benefits of running endless tests to check safety measures, ensure strength and endurance and operate software through CAE, all while reducing production time and costs.
Could you tell us more about the unique platform known as MeshWorks to assist in virtual validation and optimization within the aerospace industry?
MeshWorks provides an integrated CAE platform that enables users to utilize virtual validation while optimizing workflows in the industry. There is a clear increase in the volume of simulation work nowadays, as the cost of doing design changes is minimal at the concept stage. MW, with its morphing and parameterization leadership and early stage optimization enables aerospace companies to do a lot of work in the early concept stages. Through its pre-processing tools and design optimization possibilities, MW also companies complete several tasks across the concept, verification and validation, and detailed design stage. Even in the verification and validation stage, where almost all the geometric interiors and exteriors are all frozen and the structural performances still need to be improved, MW can be very helpful.
What is the role of Design Enablers in CAE design, and how can they power design-driven innovations in the product development process?
In CAE, manually creating geometry, mesh or connections takes a significant amount of time for a design engineer to do. DEP MeshWorks has a powerful Design Enablers module that will allow users to automatically create typical design solutions required to improve structural and CFD performance and reduce weight. These Design Enablers can be executed as an integrated solution complete with properties, materials, connectors etc. They can be developed easily without the user having to manually create geometry, mesh, or connections capable of providing high-level inputs, as a design engineer would. All kinds of typical Design Enablers are available as automated ‘ready-to-use’ CAE solutions. Since it can be executed as a batch process for future product lines as well, it is an innovative solution which can really help speed up the time taken for the product development process.
There is a clear increase in the volume of simulation work nowadays. How is Simulation technology improving quality in the manufacturing industry? Simulation technology is very important, design simulation is one of the critical points in the past for manufacturing industries. I’m glad that with our technologies and through other technologies, CAE makes manufacturing assessments easier in a digital way. For instance, if you take the injection moulded process, you could put your gate location where you’re putting the material, and the temperature, then run the simulation. If you see a defect in your actual part, those defects could be early optimized by doing CAE assessment. That’s the immediate advantage having simulation. Otherwise, you have to build the tools which will cost millions of dollars. Optimization can be done with all these parameters checked up in the gate location combined with other structural parameters. This process not only optimizes your component for manufacturing but at the same time considers the product’s performance and weight as well.Â
What is Digital Twin Technology and why IoT is the backbone for Digital Twin?
Digital Twin, rather than doing a physical prototype and making an actual part, you are validating your manufacturing process or your virtual performance. A digital twin, also called a virtual twin, or simulated twin, is the virtual form of a real-world asset or process. They are built to exist along with the life of the product and help to optimize the real physical asset.
IoT and Digital Twin are two concepts that are intertwined. With the advancement of the Internet of Things, the digital twin process can now enable testing, analysis and predictions based on real-world scenarios rather than a set of assumptions, whereby the results of these tests will be accurate, saving time and money. The amount of data generated in digital twin methodology is enormous, and IoT has to keep up with the volume of data and analysis needed. On the other hand, Digital twin is crucial to the development of IoT, as IoT has to re-evolve to meet the rapidly growing standard of the Digital twin based on its accuracy, data capacities and sensing capabilities.
This can be analysed and real time feedback on performance, emission, and any other parameters you wish to track can be provided. It is particularly useful when the physical asset is in difficult to access locations or undergoing unmanned programs.
What are the recent innovations by DEP in the AI/ML/analytics space?
Our development team is currently working on implementing some advanced AI methodologies that facilitate MeshWorks users during various development stages. With the implemented intelligence, additional insights will be provided to users on even minute impacts for any given use case of Morphing, CAE Process automation, etc. With all the uploaded data, the software will compute the necessary factors and provide the user with more clear results for better optimization using features and pattern recognitions.
Do you see future opportunities for using Drone technologies in the manufacturing sector?
Drones are becoming important players in the manufacturing industry compared to the former association, mainly with military or hobbyist applications. DEP does a lot of aftermarket product and services and the drone is one of them. The drone is not only applicable to Manufacturing, it could be applied to any industry. Personally, the drone is like robots in the air; the work they do on the ground today can be done in the air tomorrow. At DEP, we have done this interesting project where we added a lot of control systems to a drone, through which we aid in deterring birds and assessing safety during takeoffs and landings. For instance, the drone goes in the air to deter birds and creates high-frequency noise to scatter the birds. So birds will be out of the way of the aircraft. This way, you easily provided solutions without doing it manually. Similarly, not only for Manufacturing, drone technology can be used for many applications. All of these depend on our vision to create real-world solutions. We would love to create more such variants as we have all the basic technology that exists on our side.