Action Research on Virtual-Reality-Assisted Product and Process Design

Virtual reality (VR) technology improves engineering activities, enabling a better understanding of products and processes. A complete conversion from the existing CAx software to a VR environment could improve product and process design activities, leading to new practices. This article aims to provide key insights, technical evidences, and related impacts on the engineering activities of industrial companies while integrating the existing systems with VR as a supporting tool for product and process design. The results indicate improved design and limited negative impacts related to errors during the manufacturing phase. An action research study involving Oil&Gas manufacturing companies was conducted to explore the following four CAx-VR scenarios: CAD–VR for ergonomics/reachability, CAE(CFD)–VR and CAE(FEM)–VR for abstract data visualization, and CAM–VR for packaging. For each scenario, applicative cases focusing on Oil&Gas products, such as multistage centrifugal pumps and ball valves, have been investigated. Furthermore, a detailed discussion of the involved chain of software applications and impacts on the engineering activities for each scenario establishes the reliability of the integrated environment for CAD, CAE, and CAM data immersive visualization.

I. Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly attracting the attention of both society and industry. Presently, this technology is in a mature phase. The VR tools are now available at lower costs and with considerably advanced functionalities. Hence, nearly every company is informed and has probably been considering its use. The considerable volume of raw data, often unknown, generated during the design and currently available with companies needs to be translated into an equally significant amount of knowledge for value addition [1]. This establishes the increasing importance of technologies, such as VR that support a stagewise design, based not only on knowledge capture and use, but also on simulations [1]. For example, according to Berg and Vance [2], the use of VR during the design review phase provides the following benefits: It creates a strong awareness of the spatial relationships between product components and of the interaction space around the assembly line; it eliminates any hesitation to explore additional design challenges; and it increases the sense of team engagement because they experience the design environment with fewer distractions, especially due to the use of electronic devices (e.g., smartphones and PC). However, the time needed to learn a new user interface could be a barrier, and the design team could prefer using desktop applications rather than VR. Nevertheless, the use of VR for design support could lead to direct evaluation of alternative configurations, interaction with the product model, feasibility evaluation of the design parts, and assembly/disassembly verification [3]. Thus, VR certainly increases the realism of computer-aided design (CAD) model representations and helps the users analyze and check the assembly models for errors [4]. Therefore, designers must understand the different engineering representations. Indeed, according to Hannah et al. [5], the accuracy and confidence of the results increase, when drawing conclusions are based on high-fidelity representations.