Reverse engineering and its importance in new product development

By Ashish Potdar

Two decades back, CAD/CAM was a new domain in the field of new product development (NPD), and the manufacturing industry started using this technology mainly used to reduce product design cycle after it was universally accepted and people trusting this technology.

A decade later, many of them realised that new product development is essentially 60% to 70% of derivatives from the existing products available in India as well as abroad. Then what is the need to reinvent the wheel when it is already there? This was the stage where the role of Reverse Engineering came into play. Nowadays, the early technology adopters have started using terminologies such as 3D digitising, white light scanning and laser scanning which are predominantly used for copying the available product as it is.

Today, CAD/CAM has become an essential and integral part of NPD and people have started looking for the advances in this domains such as Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) to validate product development as also to reduce design cycle time and so reverse engineering techniques have started picking up effectively.

Even though the investment in this domain is restricted only to few major players, it has also become a new source of income for some individual consultants who have started offering these engineering design services. Eventually, some of them took risk to invest in procurement of these scanners and the required software to run them. Since the minimum investment to commence these services is in the range of Rs50 lakh to Rs1 crore, the number of such consultants are restricted to a dozen spread across the country.

This is the decade of 3D printing, conventionally popular as Rapid Prototyping. Even as this technology has been creating waves globally for the last two decades, it is witnessing a rapid change and today is not only restricted to plastics and polymers resins, but has spread its wings in metal printing, ceramic printing and pattern, jewellery design, titanium etc. Even some bio-compatible materials can also be fitted into a human body with the help of this technology.

The basic input for 3D printing is steriolithography (STL) file which can be obtained from your CAD i.e. 3D solid modelling. As the usage of CAD, particularly 3D animation, 2D drafting to get an engineering drawing and CNC programming for usage on CNC milling, turning and wire cut machine, is increasing by the day, the requirement of CAD modelling is huge compared to the available resources. Hence alternative methods such as reverse engineering is easy and fast besides it reduces the overall design cycle time.

In the conventional method of NPD, the concept was jotted down on sketch mode with designer and after getting the approval from marketing department, it is dimensionally constrained by the engineer. Later, a mock up or handmade prototype or even a clay model used to be prepared. This process is very long and prone to lot of errors in the manufacturing process.

Instead of this conventional method, the CAD/CAM usage along with reverse engineering and 3D printing gives the prototypes faster and more accurate. Also, the same model is further used for validating of product (CAE) and also in the CNC programming (CAM). Thus, it drastically reduces the new product development cycle more than half the time as compared to the traditional process. Since the same 3D solid model is used throughout the entire product development cycle, it is very less prone to manufacturing and design defects. The quality of the product can also be enhanced by doing more and more validity iteration on the same model.

In the conclusion we can say that CAD/CAM is the most integral and important part of new product development. This process of NPD can be further enhanced in terms of better quality and shorter time cycle with the usage of Reverse Engineering Techniques and Rapid Prototyping Techniques.

Mr Ashish Potdar is Chairman, Sunvision Technologies Pvt Ltd which is Reverse Engineering Studio having all the latest technology 3D scanners and Reverse Engineering Softwares with more than 400 esteemed clients in Automotive, Aerospce, Consumer Electronics and white goods.

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