The Digital Mechanism and Gear Library as a Tool to Support the Engineering Designers Work

Motion systems are important parts of technical products. Those are often composed using mechanisms and gears. However, the worldwide existing knowledge about mechanisms in theory and practice is mostly scattered and only fragmentarily accessible for users like students, engineers and scientists. It does not comply with today’s requirements concerning a rapid information retrieval. This paper presents the “Digital Mechanism and Gear Library” (DMG-Lib), which is an interdisciplinary project of three Technical Universities in Germany. The aim of the project is to develop a new digital, internet-based library (www.dmg-lib.org) to collect, preserve and present the knowledge of mechanism and gear science using the state-of-the-art in the field of interaction, metadata and search algorithms. Combined with innovative multimedia applications and a semantic information retrieval environment, the DMG-Lib provides an efficient access to this knowledge space of mechanism and gear science. The DMG-Lib contains a wide range of digitalized information resources in very heterogeneous media representations. The resources are enriched with various additional information like animations and simulations. This digital library will support engineering designers in many aspects of the product development. During the design process the designer is able to find possible solutions, calculation procedures for dimensioning, etc. Beside the description of the project this paper shows some possibilities how to support designers work today and in the future.