Digital simulation tools enable designers to virtually prototype industrial controls engineering, by Don Talend, brand storytelling, content management, and content strategy expert. Industrial controls industry

1. Home / Articles / 2008 / Prototyping of the Virtual Type
Digital Simulation Tools Can Integrate Functional Areas of Design, Improve Product Quality,
Maximize Throughput and Reduce Time to Market
Aug 13, 2008
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By Don Talend
Simulation of machine performance impacts various facets of industrial automation, from mechanical and
electrical to controls engineering. To the controls engineer, simulation could be described as virtual prototyping
that reduces a products time to market and bridges the gap between production throughput and product quality.
From the viewpoint of an interdisciplinary product design and production team, simulation often can penetrate the
information silos that typically have existed between functional areas of mechanical, electrical and controls
engineering. Simulation tools have a collaborative capability since anyone on the team can determine the impact
of design or control changes on the manufacturing process.
Simulation tools give controls engineers opportunities to get involved in the product design process from its origin
and to test machinery virtually so it becomes operational faster.
One mission-critical application uses simulation to test the interconnection of wind energy systems to municipal
power grids. Energy To Quality, a wind energy electrical services company in Madrid, Spain, tests wind farms
with a mobile voltage-dip generator controlled by National Instruments LabView and a PXI/SCXI system. PXI is
PCI extensions for instrumentation, a PC-based platform for measurement and automation systems that
operates on the PCI bus standard. The PXI/SCXI system uses high-voltage input modules to measure secondary
voltages at 110 Vac while controlling relays connected to tripping coils. The program creates electrical shorts to
simulate faults prior to grid interconnection. and communicates results to a remote computer. The testing
procedure allows operators to know immediately if the wind turbine complies with the requirements, enabling
new wind farms to come online quickly without causing outages.
Trompeter Enterprises, Sterling Heights, Mich., an automation controls engineering firm specializing in
automaking, uses Delmia Robotics, a manufacturing process simulation tool from Dassualt Systemes, to
determine the positioning of welding and assembly tooling in its robotic simulations (Figure 1). A lot of times
youre developing the tooling and you find out you cant get a weld done in a tight space, notes Matt Trompeter,
president. Without developing it in simulation first, youre not going to find out until you get out on the floor.
Trompeter says positioning problems in a process often result in the carmaker requesting a tooling change by the
machine builder.
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2. Trompeter also uses the Delmia Quest advanced simulation tool to simulate various manufacturing scenarios
with varying inputs such as facility layout, resource allocation and alternate scheduling scenarios in order to
determine production throughput. It ties together robotic simulation for the robot and the simulations you get with
the cycle times, combined with operator schedules and machine downtimes and gives you real throughput, he
says.
To Brian MacCleery, senior product manager, industrial and embedded design for design, deployment and
embedded application developer National Instruments, Austin, Texas, simulation represents the biggest
advancement yet in the concept of mechatronicsthe convergence of mechanical, electrical and controls
engineering for more productive systems and higher-quality products. The catalyst for real progress in
mechatronics, he says, is actually the replacement of mechanical controls with electronic controls.
For example, you have domains such as motion control that was almost completely controlled by the mechanical
engineering team when it was gears and cams, he says. Now, the performance depends on how the PID
controller is tuned, you have high-frequency drive circuits that pulse current through the motor at 20 kHz, and
motion trajectories that have a huge impact on the mechanical system and the stresses, strains and torques it
experiences.
Craig Therrien, product manager for 3-D CAD developer SolidWorks, explains that simulation via virtual
prototyping represents an evolutionary step forward from traditional physical prototyping. By the time a physical
prototype is available so the controls engineer can finalize the machine to manufacture the product under the
traditional design approach, youre making panic-type fixes, adding weight to dampen vibration, slowing the
throughput of your machine down so youre not having too much deflection, says Therrien. Youre doing things
you really dont want to do. Youre doing a lot of extra work at the end that should have been taken care of at the
front of the design.
The cause of this last-minute chaos, argues Therrien, is those information silos. Typically, you see a divide
between controls people and mechanical systems designers, he notes. Usually theyll meet once at the start of
the project and then they kind of go their own way. A lot of times near the end, the machine designers throw their
designs at the controls guys and say, Make it work.
In recent years, NI has worked with SolidWorks to use and co-develop several simulation tools to eliminate
machine and product design problems early in the development process. MacCleery recently wrote a white
paper detailing the use of these tools, which will be used in a machine design guide NI is publishing. These
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