CONCURRENT ENGINEERING BASED ON VIRTUAL MANUFACTURING

Original scientific paper The paper deals with the concurrent engineering concept that implies simultaneous activities in integrated product and process development, through the application of Virtual Engineering Technologies, especially in the simulation of production, i.e. Virtual Manufacturing. The main goal is to minimize design modifications in final design stages, and therewith time and costs of design of product and related processes. Expensive physical prototypes and experiments can be avoided by applying numerical FE/FV simulations. Development time is drastically decreased; many design alternatives can be verified, leading to quality improvements. Application of CE concept is illustrated through numerous case studies of numerical simulations of processes using SIMUFACT.forming software: thick sheet forming, forging, net-shape forming, hot profile extrusion, etc.