An engineering designer′s view of virtual engineering and rapid prototyping

The design process is an uncertain activity which the designer must learn to handle. This is done, to a limited extent, by adopting standard procedures and problem containment strategies. Both can lead to inefficient operations and non‐optimized designs, which affect the time to market and user acceptability. The advances in virtual engineering and rapid prototyping can be seen as elements in a new model‐based approach directed at providing increased confidence in a design at the earliest possible stage. These new techniques can be used to provide early feedback and improvements in products, in areas as diverse as customer response to style and form, through to the evaluation of new operating procedures and training. The resolution of such problems during the design phase will greatly improve not only the quality of the product, but also its time to market. Such an approach is currently being investigated by the author′s research group, and a computer‐aided design environment incorporating these ideas is being created for the design of process machinery.