Intelligent Manufacturing € January € 1996 € Vol. 2 € No. 1

Virtual Prototyping at Rolls-Royce

By David Greenfield
Managing Editor


Virtual reality (VR) is now receiving serious consideration in the manufacturing arena, particularly in the area of prototyping. Prototyping is one of the necessary evils of manufacturing, and this trial-and-error method can be one of the more costly steps in the manufacturing process of any new product or design. With VR, products can be designed and tested in a virtual world; no full-scale, real-world products or models need be developed just to see how well they hold up. Everything a manufacturer needs to know about the integrity of his new design or product can be determined without the cost and time of building prototypes and then spending additional time testing these prototypes in various real-world situations.

One company introducing virtual prototyping to the manufacturing realm is Intelligence Systems Solutions (ISS) Ltd. (Salford, England). According to Andrew Connell, lead VR researcher at ISS, the biggest difficulty getting companies to accept virtual reality is in conveying the message of how cost effective VR can be for their business. "They often don't understand what they can get from VR," said Connell. "They have CAD technology, but they really don't know what VR is going to do on top of that. They think VR is just going to be faster CAD running on a bigger computer. So we supply education, and we do that through the use of demonstrators."

For instance, ISS has developed a demonstrator for London-based Rolls-Royce Aero Engine Services Ltd. for the company's Trent 800 engine, which is used in the Boeing 777. One major obstacle Connell had to surmount in implementing the VR concept at Rolls-Royce was getting the company past its reliance on CAD followed by real-world prototyping. This was especially tough since Rolls-Royce's customers desired this approach.

"Their customers wanted it proven to them that the engine could be assembled and maintained," said Connell. "So Rolls-Royce would build a physical mock-up. They would build this perfect model of the engine out of wood, metal and plastic. It costs about £2 million to produce, compared to about £5 million for an engine. All this does is let them prove that they can put the engine together, that it can actually be maintained, and that certain operations can be done in a certain order and within a certain time."

Rolls-Royce held CAD in such high esteem that Connell said of the company, "They used CAD as if one day they'll have a perfect photocopying machine or printer that they'll just feed the CAD design into, and they'll get an engine out of the other end, if they design appropriately for that." Although CAD data is the building block upon which virtual prototyping is developed (virtual prototyping interprets CAD data), CAD design is incredibly more complex than virtual design. The level of detail necessary in CAD is not required of virtual prototyping. "We (VR users) need something you can actually get in, put on a headset, get in there with your hands and actually pick up a tool and try and go out and use that tool," said Connell.

The VR demonstrator that ISS developed was a basic VR unit that enabled Rolls-Royce to plug its CAD data into the VR system, tag certain items, like bolts with functionality, and then pick up a tool and try to hit those bolts. Users of the VR system could also remove brackets and pipes from the engine. This type of virtual interaction with the engine under design, without a prototype physically being built, allowed Rolls-Royce to make an assessment of how easy it would be to build the engine and maintain it.
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