Mahindra & Mahindra

Mahindra & Mahindra recognizes CEAD as superior tool for engineeringdesign as it has various specific features for engineering design.

About Mahindra Group and Mahindra Research Valley Mahindra Group is a $16.9 billion global corporation employing more than 200,000 people across the globe. The Group's flagship company, Mahindra & Mahindra, is a leader in the tractor and utility vehicles space.

Mahindra Research Valley is a design and R&D facility spread over 125 acres in Mahindra World City, Chennai and was created at an investment of over Rs. 650 crore. Home to over 1500 employees, it has experts who are leading various technology and product development projects. It is the most modern automobile and tractor R&D facility in India.

The Business Challenge An important aspect of customer impression for a manual transmission vehicle is the gear shift. The gear shift is the interface between driver and vehicle transmission. Therefore this frequently used mechanism can influence the driver's impression of the vehicle. The required attributes of a gear shift are: smooth, noiseless and vibration-less. The quality of the gearshift can be improved by optimizing the operating force path.

The conventional way of optimizing operating force was non optimal and time consuming as there was no visual feedback and recreation of geometry in spreadsheet was needed for every change in parameter. The design team at Mahindra was looking for ways to improve this process to cut the amount time and effort spend on this simple and repetitive task.

Customer Success Story

Design team has developed a mechanism where a shift rail geometry decides the manual force required for gear change. The ramp profile geometry has to be synthesized for the required shift force. The ramp profile geometry is governed by dimensional parameters such as the angle of accent, angle of decent, etc.

Challenge was to derive an optimum ramp profile with pre-defined shift force and engagement torque. Design team needs to carry out what if analysis of the ramp profile geometry with the given parameters on a regular basis for every new design.

The Engineering Challenge

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Traditional ApproachDesign Team recreates the geometry in spreadsheet by finding the co-ordinates. As excel does not allow any geometric

constraint, they had the challenge of finding the fillet radius for the shift rail and maintaining the tangency. For each change of

parameter, they had to recreate the whole geometry again in Excel. Some of the screen shot of the existing conventional

method are as follows :

Existing method

In CEAD all the necessary requirement were provided as geometric, dimensional and equation constraint. Basic

geometry with a variable for each dimension was drawn. In the below screenshot, roller is in green, profile geometry is

coloured brown. Green point at the bottom is the axis about which the profile rotates.

CEAD Approach

Customer Success Story Mahindra & Mahindra

Customer Success Story Mahindra & Mahindra

Ramp profile was divided into three parts i.e., Accent, Arc and

Decent of roller. Forces on the ramp and roller have been provided

using vectors. Relations between the 'torque– force' and 'friction

force - normal force' has been established using equations.

Horizontal force on roller from the slider has been calculated

graphically using the force polygon.

As per Constraint Driven Engineering Design Synthesis Methodology:

1. The stated constraints are : • Height(Ht) is fixed • Roller radius is defined • Input Torque is provided

• Force equilibrium has to be established.(Force Equilibrium Polygon)• Relation between friction force and normal force is defined as equation mentioned below.

2. The unstated constraints are :

These boundary conditions have been first established. Then they have optimized the torque to the given value, during the

process they synthesized geometry.

By using CEAD, they have saved lot of time such that, introducing a small change (say fillet radius) and run the simulation, it

automatically gets the ramp force values in excel, no need to start from the beginning as in conventional method. Exporting

defined desired parameters to excel becomes easier.

Customer TestimonyMr. Ganesh Adiga, Design Head - Automotive

Transmission of Mahindra & Mahindra says –

“We have been looking for a replacement to Excel as it is not the best tool for engineering design. The conventional approach was non optimal. By using CEAD we were able to synthesize the geometry by utilizing various features of CEAD like geometric constraints, vectors, simulation and optimization. Geometric visualization of design is one among the various advantages of CEAD over Excel.”

ConclusionMahindra Design Team has been able to save considerable amount of

time by using CEAD. CEAD also helps visualize the geometry which

was a constraint in spreadsheet. Using CEAD to setup initial ramp

profile geometry along with the forces, necessary relations and desired

parameters reduced the time by 30% of that of the conventional

approach. After setting up of the problem, they can directly change the

parameters for what if analysis and need not recreate the whole

geometry as in the conventional method. There by the created CEAD

file can be used as a template for future design and hence substantial

amount of time can be reduced on future designs. Design team has

easily adapted to CEAD.

Kunal, R., Adiga, G., Gill, S., and Sharma, M., "Simulation of Gear

Shift Force Curve and Shift Rail Ramp Profile," SAE Technical Paper

2010-01-0896, 2010, doi:10.4271/2010-01-0896.

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Reference

Customer Success Story Mahindra & Mahindra

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About CEAD

CEAD is a design software that helps in developing, and validating designs at the conceptual level. CEAD is based on the new Design Synthesis methodology and provides an ideal platform to synthesize design in the pre-CAD stage.

Design Synthesis is superior to iterative methods because it encapsulates all the customer needs and working conditions into the problem at one go.Design Synthesis helps innovate new solutions to conventional design problems and evaluate more concepts early in design cycle.

CEAD also helps in reducing the product design cycle time and cost as it reduces the costly iterations between CAD and CAE tools later in the design cycle. It is possible because CEAD helps in starting your 3d models with better initial values.