Agility through design automation: A study on centrifugal pump design

The objective of this paper is to study the basic concepts of agile manufacturing, its enablers and applications in industry. The paper also concentrates on how this concept of agile manufacturing can be used effectively in centrifugal pump industry for design process. With the presented work the author has tried to automate the design of centrifugal pump using macros in CATIA V5. The pump manufacturing industry will able to meet the dynamic requirements of customer in very short duration of time. In this work, author tried to take the input parameters in MS Excel and using parametric relations all other dimensions are calculated. These values are read using macros in CATIA and the part drawings along with their assembly drawing are generated. The user will also be able to extract 2D views from part drawings and assembly drawing. All the part drawings and 2D drawings will be saved automatically at specified folder. The time required for repetitive task is reduced considerably. In this way the customer demands can be responded quickly and agility can be achieved.