Rubbermaid slashes development time using CAERubbermaid slashes development time using CAE
April 1, 1997
Ever wonder how much abuse plastic household products can take before they're ready for recycling? Rubbermaid's ability to optimize new plastic product designs, such as hardware items, ensures that consumers rarely have to find out.
Earlier in its manufacturing history, Rubbermaid distinguished itself by molding trash cans able to withstand the "freeze-and-drop" test using traditional design analysis processes. That experience helped form the company philosophy. According to John Vura, CAD manager of the Home Products Div., Rubbermaid is committed to CAE to develop cost effective products that have increasingly shorter time-to-market cycles.
Vura's division recently installed Pro/E (from Parametric Technology Corp., Waltham, MA) as its CAD tool and Ansys (Houston, PA) as its preferred design analysis and optimization solution. Home Products' cadre of engineers and designers also relies heavily on flow analysis to determine potential warpage and cooling problems, among others. Even before these developments, however, the division's unique approach to product development already gained it marked improvement in certain new product lines, particularly plastic hardware items including toolboxes, mailboxes, modular shelving, and small-parts organizers. Of the various hardware items, the 20-inch, flat-top toolbox seems to have benefited most from design analysis and optimization.
Home Products' design team - consisting of industrial designers and product, mold, and design engineers - has been able to improve the reliability, structural integrity, and moldability of the toolbox by coupling the design optimization capabilities of Ansys with an in-house proprietary loads analysis package. The enhanced 20-inch, flat-top toolbox no longer incorporates steel hinge pins and it now has all-plastic hinges, thus resulting in a lighter product that is more corrosion resistant and less costly to produce.
Before implementing its CAD and CAE systems, the Home Products Div. relied solely on outside engineering consultants to perform design analysis, some of whom were using traditional design analysis techniques to develop design-for-manufacturing data. The Home Products Div. installed Ansys software to gain more control over costs associated with the design development process, to bring down total product costs. Using Ansys, engineers and designers can simulate and optimize designs early, allowing time for other departments' input prior to production. Engineers in the Wooster, OH-based division simulate how real-world testing affects a product's stability, applying operating loads and other criteria to study physical responses, such as weight, stress, strain, and pressure.
Simulating analysis up-front in the development process has significantly streamlined new product design costs. Vura says, "We eliminated trial-and-error methodology from our design processes. Our 20-inch toolbox is one example. We now have analysis tools that allow us to accurately simulate at a moment's notice how a product will perform under stress; we can perform thousands of simulated handle lift tests with a 25-lb weight inside the toolbox prior to running the actual tests. Thanks to engineering expertise supported by today's technology, we're able to deliver better customer satisfaction and we have reduced new product development time by a large percent."
More basic plastic items, such as food containers, sinkware, and trash cans, once made up the vast majority of Rubbermaid home products. These did not warrant structural and optimizational analysis - structural demands are much less stringent for these parts. However, as the division continues to introduce more structurally complex products, such as plastic hardware items, analysis is becoming essential. According to Vura, "The functional nature of these items warrants a whole new set of design standards. You're not going to encounter too many structural issues with items such as wastebaskets and food containers. But when it comes to portable work centers and shelving, there is a different set of industry standards to consider, especially where weight, stress, strain, and compression deflection are involved."
Deploying analysis up-front in the development process has proven beneficial in leveraging new product marketability against profit margins as well. "If one of our retail suppliers wants us to design a product at a certain price, there's always a chance that we can't achieve it because of the overhead involved in its construction," Vura said. "Through analysis simulation, we're able to evaluate immediately whether we can, in fact, meet the request, and how to do it and get a good return on our investment. That's how a company such as Rubbermaid succeeds in a global marketplace."
Vura admits that although Home Products has made significant strides with its new analysis and optimization tools, its expertise in using and fully understanding simulation and optimization possibilities continues to evolve. Though Ansys has been applied primarily to analyze structural designs, Home Products also uses it to simulate other aspects of production, including the optimizing of shipping cartons. Says Vura, "We can simulate shipping a certain number of wastebaskets or laundry baskets to prevent products and packaging from arriving in less than optimum condition."
You May Also Like