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Sunday, September 13, 2009

Design Engineer Tasks

The design engineer may direct a team of designers to create the drawings necessary for prototyping and production, or in the case of buildings, for construction. However, with the advent of CAD and solid modeling software (SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Autodesk Inventor, Pro/ENGINEER, NX, CATIA, etc, for example) the design engineer may create the drawings him or herself.

The next responsibility of many design engineers is prototyping. A model of the product is created and reviewed. Prototypes are usually functional and non-functional. Functional prototypes are used for testing and the non-functional are used for form and fit checking. This stage is where design flaws are found and corrected, and tooling, manufacturing fixtures, and packaging are developed.

Once the prototype is finalized, after many iterations, the next step is preproduction. The design engineer, working with a manufacturing engineer and a quality engineer reviews an initial run of components and assemblies for design compliance. This is often determined through statistical process control. Variations in the product are correlated to aspects of the process and eliminated. The most common metric used is the process capability index Cpk. A Cpk of 1.0 is considered the baseline acceptance for full production go-ahead.

The design engineer may follow the product and make requested changes and corrections throughout the life of the product. This is referred to as "cradle to grave" engineering.

Design Engineer : ijan08

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