|
|
ONLINE FEATURES
Book Reviews
BW Video
Columnists
Interactive Gallery
Newsletters
Past Covers
Philanthropy
Podcasts
Special Reports
BLOGS
Auto Beat
Bangalore Tigers
Blogspotting
Brand New Day
Byte of the Apple
Economics Unbound
Eye on Asia
Fine On Media
Green Biz
Hot Property
Investing Insights
Management IQ
NEXT: Innovation
NussbaumOnDesign
Tech Beat
Working Parents
TECHNOLOGY
J.D. Power Ratings
Product Reviews
Tech Stats
Wildstrom: Tech Maven
AUTOS
Home Page
Auto Reviews
Classic Cars
Car Care & Safety
Hybrids
INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads | |
NOVEMBER 30, 2004
By Otis Port A Bolt of Genius in Welding A new technology finally allows an accurate way to gauge the strength of welded metal. The projected savings industrywide: Billions Sparks shooting from robot welding machines: It's an iconic image of car manufacturing. But at Ford Motor (F ), engineers now see the shower of sparks as a fireworks celebration marking a radical improvement in welding technology. Any change for the better in this area would be a big deal. Welding plays a huge role in the production of everything from motor vehicles and oil rigs and pipelines to bridges and other huge steel structures. Yet it has been fairly static in the last two decades. Talk to any engineer who designs welded structures, though, and you'll hear the same lament: The computer-aided design and engineering (CAD/CAE) tools for predicting how strong a weld needs to be are notoriously inexact. As a result, most welds are grossly overengineered to ensure a handsome margin of safety. Trimming this unnecessary consumption of time and materials has been a longstanding goal. Finally, a team led by Pingsha Dong, head of welding research at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, has found a seemingly magical diet pill for welding. It's called Verity. INDUSTRY HEAVYWEIGHTS. Most experts scoffed when Dong claimed in 2000 that he had developed an accurate technique for predicting weld strength and fatigue life. Too many similar claims had previously come to naught. "Even the best CAD software [fell] short," Dong says, adding that "eventually, many researchers gave up, so engineers have had to rely pretty much on empirical methods based on past experience." However, skepticism is fading fast. Dong's new software has won a thumbs-up at heavyweights such as Caterpillar (CAT ) and ChevronTexaco (CVX ). Ford's designers have been using Verity since last year to reduce the cost of producing new car bodies. So far, the savings are running into the millions of dollars, says Hari N. Agrawal, Ford's senior technical specialist in welding. For industry as a whole, Battelle figures the savings could climb into the billions. Last March, Dong's breakthrough was crowned by the Society of Automotive Engineers as the most important engineering advance in 2003. SAE presented Dong, Agrawal, and two other members of the Verity team with the Henry Ford II Distinguished Award for Excellence in Automotive Engineering. DRAWING FROM HISTORY. The key to Verity's accuracy, says Dong, is something called "mesh insensitivity." When design engineers work on a welded structure, they create computer models that carve the product into myriad tiny shapes -- the model looks like it's wrapped in a fine screen or net. As the design evolves, the size of the mesh usually gets smaller, since that normally yields more accurate engineering data. "But that's not the case with sharp corners, where two steel components are joined together," Dong notes. Countless studies have shown that predicted weld strength varies widely with changes in mesh size -- and the fluctuations seem to have no predictable relationship with mesh size. This erratic, capricious behavior rendered computer models for predicting weld strength inaccurate, and many welding researchers simply tossed in the towel on finding a better way. Not Dong. His solution to this dilemma is elegantly simple: Give the computer a fixed rule for calculating corner stresses regardless of mesh size. He came up with this formula by surveying 50 years of engineering literature on stress testing and fatigue life. OTHER USES AHEAD? Analyzing the data, he found it clumped together in a fairly tight curve, taking into account such factors as the type of steel, its thickness, and stress forces. "Holding the stress calculations essentially constant when you model a corner," Dong says, "gives consistent results and allows you to predict fatigue life accurately." The vast share of all stress cracks and fatigue failures occur in corner areas -- whether or not they're welded. So, welding could be just the first of many applications for Verity.  Port is a senior writer for BusinessWeek in New York Edited by Thane Peterson
BW MALL
SPONSORED LINKS
Buy a link now!Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | |
 Copyright 2004, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.Terms of Use | Privacy Notice |
Printer-Friendly Version
