Intelligent Part Design With Topology Optimisation Software

Leamington Spa, England, August 16, 2017 (Newswire.com) - Mountain bikes need to be flexible, with a lightweight and responsive frame. Even a few grams can make the difference between mounting the summit or heading down early. For Robot Bike Co, who create custom-fitted mountain bikes, this is even more critical than for most bike designers.

Robot Bike Co are world-leading manufacturers of custom-fitted bikes for dedicated riders that demand the best performance available. They're designed to be long-lasting, lightweight machines, with custom geometry and full suspension frames. The engineers, designers, and cycling professionals that build them work at the cutting-edge of design, simulation and test, making them a perfect fit for experimenting with topology optimisation software.

Before designing their latest R130 mountain bike, Robot Bike Co approached GRM Consulting Ltd to see if they could use their topology optimisation software to ensure their new components would be as lightweight as possible. GRM's software has been used in motorsport, aeronautics, and even the military, so high-performance bikes are an ideal environment for testing the software. The first component which they optimised was a rocker mounted on the bike frame which allows the suspension to travel 130mm vertically, an ideal travel length for dealing with rough ground conditions.

Topology optimisation is a mathematical method which removes any material that's surplus to requirements, based on the applied loads and boundary conditions of the part. This means designers and engineers can apply the necessary material in the most structurally efficient way, ensuring their designs are both lightweight and cost-effective, regardless of their chosen manufacturing method.

The Optimisation Process

In the case of Robot Bike Co's rocker component, the first thing to do was define the maximum available space that the rocker could fit into. This would provide the design space for the optimisation (See Figure 1 in the images).

Finite Element Analysis (FEA) was then set up for the key load cases using SOLIDWORKS simulation (Figure 2). These simulations were used as the basis for the following topology optimisations which were conducted in TruForm SW.

Initially, Robot Bike Co set up and ran a simulation study for the most aggressive load which is a bottoming out force applied at the rear axle. This is the load case under which they predict an actual failure occurring during use. The initial topology optimisation was run for this load case with a target weight of 200 grams (Figure 3).

A topology optimisation was then conducted for a lateral load applied at the rear tyre contact patch with the ground (Load Case 4). This load case ensures the component has the required stiffness characteristics in order to give the bike the correct "feel" when in use. This can be seen in Figure 4 below. At this point, the team started to interpret the optimisation geometry into something that could be manufactured and was aesthetically acceptable (Figure 5).

This initial concept design was then reviewed with the industrial design team and the design space was modified to remove the bulk of material on the top of the part.

This new design space geometry (Figure 6) was then put through the optimisation for Load Case 1 (Figure 7) and re-interpreted into an updated design (Figure 8). A new model was then created based on this optimised geometry and subsequently re-validated in FEA against Load Case 1 and Load Case 4. During this validation procedure Robot Bike Co not only looked at the peak stresses but also did a direct comparison against the equivalent part on the R160 bike for which they had physical test data.

Following the FEA validation (Figure 9), the final part was then sent to the chosen manufacturer to discuss design for manufacture issues. This resulted in some further minor modifications, leading to the final production component (Figure 10).

At the end of the design process, Robot Bike Co had ultimately developed a rocker which was 50g (27%) lighter than the equivalent part on their R160 bike, bringing the weight down to 135g from 185g.

You can read the full white paper at www.grm-consulting.co.uk/robot-bike-co-case-study, and GRM Consulting can be contacted at +44 1926 889300 or on their website. 

Media Contact:David Smith+44 845 8128000david@gma.agency

Source: GRM Consulting

Source: Intelligent Part Design With Topology Optimisation Software

Modular Design Frameworks: A Projects-based Guide for UI/UX Designers

Learn the basic principles of modular design, and then put them into action to create sites that are easy to use, look great, and can be adapted within the context of your business needs.

With author James Cabrera―one of the thought leaders in the modular-design movement―you'll create a single, scalable project for a sample nameplate site and then adapt that same project to work successfully as a portfolio site, an e-commerce site, and finally as a news/publishing content site. Along the way, you'll learn the scientific approach to devising a sound and scalable design strategy, followed by establishing a basic foundation using various criteria relevant to that type of site. As each chapter progresses, you'll add new concepts appropriate for the project type.

Modular web and app design isn't just for so-called "creatives." It's a teachable science with principles that can be replicated in a creative manner. This approach makes the design decision making process for businesses much easier (and easier to live with). And modular design is a powerful tool for software designers to replicate effective successful designs across a spectrum of needs.

What You'll Learn

Examine the design process in a modular way

Adapt your HTML code to create different types of applications

Establish your own modular framework for your specific site's goals

Design for scale

Develop a strong foundation skeleton for design

Who This Book Is For

User experience designers, user interface designers, information architects, developers with an interest in design, developers who want to create their own design frameworks.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: A Modular FutureChapter 2: Fonts, Colors, and the Invisible UIChapter 3: Defining Your Basic UnitChapter 4: Adaptation, Reusability, Variation, and IterationChapter 5: Organization, Clustering, Pages, and NavigationChapter 6: What's Next?Appendix A: Breaking Down Examples into Modular Systems

Source: Modular Design Frameworks: A Projects-based Guide for UI/UX Designers

Sketch is not a UX design tool

The popular design app for Mac is a refined evolution of the "pen-and-paper simulator", but does not attempt to model user experiences. Even the people who built an entire React renderer just to be able to use Sketch for UX design are looking to switch away from it. The future is somewhere else.

Drawing vector graphics was one of the very first professional applications for personal computers. In those Wild West days of the late 1970s, as soon as there was a microprocessor and a display device of even bearable quality, you would also find the brave hacker trying to somehow squeeze linear algebra algorithms and detailed model data into as little as 64K of memory. Some of them succeeded, a few even made billions — my favorite startup book The Autodesk File is the unedited account of the meteoric rise of one such company.

The computer I'm typing this on has an incredible 262144 times as much memory as those systems, but vector graphics software looks surprisingly similar. Those original drawing programs were quite literally "pen-and-paper simulators" because their output was a plotter. If you're of the Snapchat generation, the easiest way to explain this device is with a picture:

A Roland DXY-100 plotter from 1982

The plotter is quite simply a very primitive robot that moves a pen on paper. High-quality laser and inkjet printers were not yet available on the general market, so a plotter was the only option for getting your vector drawings out of the computer and onto a permanent medium. (You'd really want to do this. The diskettes of the era were certainly not a place to store any valuable data long-term...)

The fundamental design of vector graphics applications derived from the plotter. Your on-screen workspace is an artboard — that literal piece of paper. The pen tool represented an actual pen. The default render operation for paths is "stroke" because that's what the pen does. Fills and gradients came later (after Adobe invented and standardized PostScript). Illustrator built on the raster capabilities of PostScript, but did nothing to change the paper-centric core workflow.

All this seems obvious. How could it be otherwise? For one possible answer, we can look at an alternate evolutionary line of computer design tools which was not bound by the same pen-and-paper constraints: 3D modeling and rendering.

By and large, 3D is an "authentically digital" form of expression. There are CAD tools for industrial design that do model behaviors of the physical world, but as a baseline, modeling and animation tools don't even pretend to represent anything physical. You have an infinite workspace and an infinite number of ways to combine elements. For producing images out of models, you use shaders — a genuinely digital concept derived from programming rather than from any specific physical model. (Shaders can be used to simulate physical surface materials, but also purely invented visual models —this is a good example of a major conceptual leap beyond merely simulating pen and paper.)

So here we are, 30 years after Illustrator first shipped, and very little has changed in this corner of the design tool space. Illustrator itself has naturally accumulated baggage over time, and recent competitors like Sketch and Figma have found success by offering a streamlined take on the same functionality… But the underlying model itself has remained the same. You start a Sketch document by selecting an artboard size, then place elements inside it; everything is built from paths which have no more intelligence than the ones used to model those plotter drawings in 1980. It's still a pen-and-paper simulator.

A recent open source project highlights this problem. Last month, Airbnb released an interesting tool named React-sketchapp. It is a library that converts the output of React JavaScript code to Sketch documents. As news of this release spread on social media, there was widespread excitement… ("React" and "Sketch" are catnip for UI hackers today.) But there was also widespread confusion: how exactly does one use this library?

On the Hacker News discussion thread, the library's developer Jon Gold helpfully explains its use case at Airbnb. After visual components have been implemented in code, the team can use React-sketchapp to create Sketch files containing rendered vector graphics that matches the code. At a large company like Airbnb, this keeps the code as the "source of truth" and ensures designers are working using the latest versions of the visual components.

There is an elephant in this room: why does the code need to be converted into a flat "pen-and-paper simulator" type of document so that designers can work on it? Imagine if this library were called "React-plotter": it would produce plotter-compatible files from code, so that designers get a paper printout of the UI components and can use scissors and glue to make their designs… That sounds kind of backwards, doesn't it? Yet the reality of flattening live components into lifeless Sketch documents is fundamentally the same.

I'm not criticizing React-sketchapp in any way. It's a very clever, beautifully implemented library that solves an acute problem at Airbnb's scale. But the reality is that the author himself recognizes the problem I pointed out. In the Hacker News thread linked above, he writes:

[…] This is a baby step to get us to the point where component-centric tools like Deco and Subform are good enough to realistically switch our design team to.

The people who built an entire React renderer just to be able to use Sketch for UX design are looking to switch away from it. The future is somewhere else.

The next generation of tools can't be pen-and-paper simulators anymore. Artboards, layers and paths have had a great 40-year run, but they are not suitable metaphors for designing software. You don't see architects planning entire buildings using Lego blocks… So why are designers in the software industry still stuck with tools that have the same (non-existent) level of modeling intelligence about user interfaces that Legos have about buildings?

I believe that the evolution of CAD tools can provide some very valuable ideas for the software industry as well. In an upcoming post, I'll explore the state of modeling in CAD and how some of the concepts might apply to software development. One core learning is this: UI designers will need to start thinking on a higher level — but that also means giving up some control. The CAD tools used by architects don't focus their attention on picking precise colors of curtains and tablecloths; yet in the UX world, that degree of fussy control over details is often seen as a core focus for design work. (Not to say that attention to detail isn't important — it is! But the purpose and form of the building has to come way before the texture of the curtains.)

For now, I'll leave you with some links to new tools that attempt to model software UX in a designer-friendly way, including the two mentioned in the above quote from Jon Gold:

Decohttps://www.decoide.org

A component-centric IDE for React Native.

This is still a programmer's tool. Deco doesn't have a design UI for creating layouts, so you need to know JavaScript and React Native to make anything.

The company was recently acquired by Airbnb and development of the tool has been discontinued, but the entire Deco IDE is open source so anyone can continue work on it.

Subformhttps://subformapp.com

A new design tool that points the way to the CAD-like future I'm hoping to see.

So far Subform is not yet available to anyone except beta testers, so it's impossible to judge how it actually fulfills the promise.

Another downside of Subform is that it doesn't provide links to developers. Designs are still static entities separate from code, and so implementing them will still require manual programming labor just as before. There also doesn't seem to be any way to bring components implemented in code back to the design environment (similar to what React-sketchapp does).

React Studiohttps://reactstudio.com

A front-end design tool for web apps.

React Studio produces complete ReactJS projects (using Facebook's "create-react-app" toolchain).

This code generation is the unique selling point: you don't need to be a programmer to use React Studio, but the software also provides many hooks for developers to customize the code output through scripts and plugins. The core of React Studio is called the "Design Compiler". Using plugins, you can also bring manually coded or modified React components into the design environment, so it's a two-way link.

The downside is that there is a substantial learning curve: many of the concepts are foreign to designers with a traditional graphics background.

Native Studio by Neontoneonto.com/nativestudio

A sister product to React Studio. It uses the same Design Compiler approach, but outputs Xcode and Android Studio projects instead.

Native Studio offers something called "frameworkless cross-platform mobile development". Quite simply it means that the tool produces native code for each platform; there is no intermediate framework or library. Traditional cross-platform solutions like Xamarin, React Native etc. all use a runtime library to translate the cross-platform code into native concepts. The Native Studio approach instead produces native code at buildtime. It's a very different way of doing cross-platform, and requires a degree of collaboration/trust between designers and developers to be truly effective.

Any other software you think should be mentioned here? Let me know in comments!

(You can also follow me on Twitter, if you absolutely insist!)

Source: Sketch is not a UX design tool

Modular Design Frameworks: A Projects-based Guide for UI/UX Designers

Learn the basic principles of modular design, and then put them into action to create sites that are easy to use, look great, and can be adapted within the context of your business needs.

With author James Cabrera―one of the thought leaders in the modular-design movement―you'll create a single, scalable project for a sample nameplate site and then adapt that same project to work successfully as a portfolio site, an e-commerce site, and finally as a news/publishing content site. Along the way, you'll learn the scientific approach to devising a sound and scalable design strategy, followed by establishing a basic foundation using various criteria relevant to that type of site. As each chapter progresses, you'll add new concepts appropriate for the project type.

Modular web and app design isn't just for so-called "creatives." It's a teachable science with principles that can be replicated in a creative manner. This approach makes the design decision making process for businesses much easier (and easier to live with). And modular design is a powerful tool for software designers to replicate effective successful designs across a spectrum of needs.

What You'll Learn

Examine the design process in a modular way

Adapt your HTML code to create different types of applications

Establish your own modular framework for your specific site's goals

Design for scale

Develop a strong foundation skeleton for design

Who This Book Is For

User experience designers, user interface designers, information architects, developers with an interest in design, developers who want to create their own design frameworks.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: A Modular FutureChapter 2: Fonts, Colors, and the Invisible UIChapter 3: Defining Your Basic UnitChapter 4: Adaptation, Reusability, Variation, and IterationChapter 5: Organization, Clustering, Pages, and NavigationChapter 6: What's Next?Appendix A: Breaking Down Examples into Modular Systems

Source: Modular Design Frameworks: A Projects-based Guide for UI/UX Designers

How to choose correct web developers for website design

When it involves selecting the right web designer for your business website, you ought to continually research check out all of the offered choices. There are several website design firms out there to settle on from. And most of them are pretty smart at what they are doing.

Always check samples of a web developer's previous work and examine their portfolio. This can assist you get a more robust grieve the websites any explicit web designer is capable of doing. Most of the time, website designers have their own distinctive vogue and you'll simply spot that styles they've worn out the past. I mean, it's just like the other artist's style; you'll undoubtedly spot their previous works supported the final layout, colour scheme, and over-all visual look of the sites.Experience is additionally a key issue here. Similar to the other craft, software designers convalesce with expertise. Thus naturally, you will be happier by selecting an internet designer has a lot of expertise below his or her belt.

Another key purpose you ought to outline is whether or not or not the net designer will cause you to a 100 percent custom data processor. Or can it's simply a basic example internet style that individuals have already got across the web. Just about anybody of late will produce a basic HTML web content in Microsoft Word or Publisher and alter the title of it to replicate their business. However you want to raise yourself: "is this very what I want for"?Web sites that are really custom designed can stand out a lot of the remainder of the fundamental example internet styles that such a lot of folks are victimisation of late. A custom website can catch the attention of your potential customers and show them that you just have a very skilled internet presence and you mean business.

A lot of web designers of late like better to do the example internet sites for one in all two reasons:

It's cheaper to use a basic example internet style. It'll inevitably value yo u a lot of for a custom website. However it's wholly definitely worth the more money spent. Trust me, within the finish you may be abundant happier together with your website if it's a site that is distinctive and created for simply your business and nobody else's.

Communication with website designer is additionally vital within the development of your data processor. You wish to be absolutely clear and outline your goals up-front, before you truly sign an internet style contract with a designer. Certify you recognise what you're obtaining for your cash and certify you get wise in writing! I even have a 9-page website contract that I take advantage of each single time Istle a replacement data processor. Enclosed during this contract is Associate in nursing itemised list of all work that's to be performed throughout the event of the net website. Things just like the actual range of pages, the precise range of graphics to be designed, whether or not or not i want to form a brand , the calculable time before completion, whether or not or not routine website maintenance are going to be performed when the positioning is vi months or one year previous, etc.Defining these items can assist you within the long haul and can conjointly certify you and also the internet designer is on a similar page.

I conjointly use what I decision my "web style coming up with worksheet". This worksheet offers "milestones" or deadlines for every section of the net style project. Things like "In two weeks the final layout are going to be done" and "2 weeks subsequently,And what concerning web hosting for your new web site? Typically, an internet designer can offer some reasonably insight on that hosting company they advocate. Web designers generally have a preference for hosting companies that they grasp are going to be an honest alternative for your website that they ought to assist you in creating this choice.

Fortunately, we've our own internet server here at Digital S piral internet style thus we are able to do all of the hosting ourselves. This can be terribly useful as a result of we are able to certify the net server stays up and running and if there's any maintenance that must be performed on the server, we are able to jazz ourselves in a very timely manner. Plus, we'll continually cut a deal for our data processor hosting services to any new. Will your new responsive web design need any specialised internet programming? Well, the solution to it question relies entirely on the requirements of your data processor.

What reasonably website can it's? Will it want a shopping-cart for e-commerce? Can you be implementing any special internet applications or on-line forms for your viewers to fill out? Can it be an internet site that needs your viewers to fill out registrations and check in so that they will login? Web developers and designers should be trained within the art of web PROGRAMMING. Web designing involves the implementation of vario us internet programming languages like JAVA, PHP, Flash, SQL, or.NET. All of those internet programming languages want extremely trained people to code them and develop internet programs with them.

I personally love PHP! I take advantage of it for just about everything. So, certify you select a web development designer capable of committal to writing any special functions that your new data processor wants. This call must be mentioned and gone over by any potential internet designer you would possibly use to form your website.

Source: How to choose correct web developers for website design