What Is Computer-Aided Engineering?

Computer-aided engineering (CAE) is an umbrella term for various technologies and methods that utilize computers to perform engineering analyses and simulations. Some of its main uses are for things like structural analysis, which evaluates product strength, stress, and warping, and dynamic analysis, which looks at how an object’s behavior changes with time and the results of things like collisions. The greatest advantage CAE offers, though, is the ability to evaluate product performance using a computer simulation before physically making the product itself.

Using CAE During Product Development

Conventional product development is a reiterative cycle that starts with design and proceeds through trial and evaluation. The cycle continues until a prototype is found to be successful, which at times involves considerable time and expense. This is where CAE is crucial for the product development process. Using CAE makes it possible to identify and resolve issues early on in the product design phase, which reduces the number of trials and evaluations that need to be done and saves both time and money. It can also be used to go a step further by simulating the loads a product might bear and conditions that would be difficult to recreate that it might experience in a variety of operating environments. Being able to discover potential risks associated with a product this way helps to improve product safety and performance. All this means that CAE promises to shorten development cycles without sacrificing the durability and reliability of the end product.

Using CAE in LM Guide Development

LM Guide Structure and the Role of Circulation Components

Let’s look at how CAE was used to develop circulation components for high-speed LM Guide performance.
The three main elements of an LM Guide are the LM rail, the LM block, and balls (rolling elements). It’s the rolling of these balls, sandwiched between the LM rail and the LM block, that provides smooth linear motion. Circulation components attached to both ends of the LM block reverse the direction the balls are traveling so that they can recirculate endlessly inside the LM block, allowing it to move back and forth freely across the LM rail.

Obstacles to Achieving High-Speed Performance

These circulation components are critical for allowing an LM Guide to move at high speeds. Because balls are constantly colliding with them, they have to be strong and durable to begin with. High-speed motion makes these collisions even more forceful, so new circulation components have had to be designed and developed to withstand higher speeds. While it would have been no easy task trying to use theoretical formulas to calculate how forcefully rolling elements collide with circulation components when an LM Guide moves at high speeds, performing the multiple trials and evaluations required to provide more reliable results could have ended up making the development process considerably longer.

Approaching the Problem with CAE: Combining Mechanism Analysis with FEM Structural Analysis

For this particular product development, we employed CAE in the form of both mechanism analysis, which can be used to evaluate the dynamic behavior of objects, and FEM structural analysis, which can be used to evaluate stress and warping. Using mechanism analysis, we can simulate an LM Guide moving at high speeds to see how the balls behave while they’re circulating, where they collide with the circulation components (both of which are difficult to observe outside of simulations), and to understand the applied load generated by those collisions. This allows us to make inferences about product performance and problem areas without making a single prototype so that we can formulate proactive responses that ultimately accelerate the development process.

Simulation of Full-Ball LM Guide behavior

Simulation of Caged Ball LM Guide behavior

CAE Brings Change and Added Value for Engineers

CAE is changing the way we do product development. It’s steering us away from the conventional reactive approach of using insights from trials and evaluations to go back and modify initial designs, and toward a more proactive one where we use CAE to foresee problems during the design phase and address them ahead of time. As a result, we’ve been able to reduce the number of times we have to go back to the design phase and the number of trials we have to perform, which has led to a shorter development cycle and more consistent quality. Using CAE isn’t just making the development process more efficient, though; it’s also drastically changing the shape of the design work that engineers do.
Being able to visualize things that are otherwise difficult to see, like the way objects behave and how load is distributed inside the LM Guide, makes the reasoning for certain design decisions more clear-cut and makes the decisions themselves more accurate. With the ability to do testing during the design phase, we’re able to dedicate more time to more value-added design considerations. CAE is more than just a tool for analysis; it’s a crucial method for enhancing the quality of our designs.

Expanding CAE Utilization and Looking Ahead

Computer-aided engineering can be used for far more than mechanism and structural analysis. Its applications span a wide range of fields that include thermal fluid analysis and acoustic analysis as well. These could prove useful beyond the product design process and might even contribute to improvements to manufacturing processes. At THK, we’re expanding our utilization of CAE to enhance product performance and drive efficiency in our development process, all with the aim of providing customers with products of higher quality ever faster than before.
Figuring out how to shorten design and development time and reduce backtracking is a challenge faced by many in the manufacturing industry. Computer-aided engineering promises to be an increasingly important and effective way of addressing it. It's worth considering where CAE could be used for your products and design processes. Even such a small step forward can lead to more efficient development of even higher-quality products.