Integrating Advanced CAE Tools and Testing Environments for the Design of Complex Mechanical Systems

Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) software are widely used to simulate the behaviour of complex mechanical systems, aiming at predicting at the early stages of design their performance and possibly preventing the occurrence of flaws or malfunctions during prototyping. The recent technological advances in hardware and software make possible a full integration of methods and tools that were developed to deal with different application fields, magnifying the power of such instruments. The designer can now use virtual prototyping environments able to drive the whole design process; they not only allow to check his/her concepts but indeed enable the optimization of the design and even of the whole manufacturing process. In this scenario, many recent research projects at the Polytechnic University of Marche exploited the integration of various CAE tools, nominally built to analyze phenomena very different to each other; in many cases they have been also interfaced with the software tools used for the final prototyping and testing phases. The paper shows three case studies, which were developed for different fields of industrial engineering, where the concurrent use of different CAE simulators helped the study of complex multiphysical mechanical systems.