Abstract: Rubber products, per 1. material, 2. design, to 3. processing, not to say from the standpoints of all three ingredients to product development, still result from “trial-and-error” in many instances in all industrial sectors. Prototypes are built for testing results of which are used to alter compounds, shapes (thus molds or dies), or processes, as new prototypes are further tested until satisfactory rubber products are reached. Indeed, if any analysis is done at all, it is seldom undertaken prior to making a rubber product (meaning before coming up with a rubber compound and the shape of a rubber product, building tooling, prototyping parts, and running tests). Rather, analysis is often requested as a last resource, to troubleshoot problems with aspects to the development process, after the fact.
Such a sequential approach to developing rubber products delays the entry to market (any sequence of compounding, tooling, prototyping, and testing is weeks to months long). Besides, any change during prototyping adds to the budget of programs (and the more, the later a change is to take place). In the very end, the limited integration of Computer-aided Manufacturing/Engineering (CAM/CAE) or Computational Fluid Dynamic/Finite Element Analysis (CFD/FEA) results in inefficiencies and a lack of design creativity (seldom, experience alone suffices, and one needs to use modern tools and simulation, which, unlike trial-and-error, are reproducible). Besides, companies stop at any working solution, as they seldom have time/money/interest left to attempt to optimize such solution through simulation (even though models would have been built, which should help further in reaching limits in compounds, product and tooling designs, and manufacturing processes, for the application troubleshot to be optimized).
Today’s rubber product development ought to integrate compound development and characterization, to product and tooling parametric CAD (Computer-aided Design) and CAM/CAE to reasonable accuracies (less than 15% error of real life). Rubber products still need to go through “what-if?” scenarios. However, these operations take place in the “virtual world”: They are computer-generated through FEA/CFD software.
Dr. Chouchaoui is the President of Windsor Industrial Development Laboratory, Inc.
Ben Chouchaoui [shoe/sha/we] is a graduate of the (École Polytechnique or) Polytechnic School of Montreal, and the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Ben’s expertise is in materials and computer based simulations (CAE/FEA/CFD computer-aided engineering, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics).
Ben worked for German and American Automotive Tier One suppliers, for six years (upon completing his PhD in 1993), in R&D, on Composites Sealing Systems (rubber and plastics). He then started WIDL or the Windsor Industrial Development Laboratory in 1998, offering cost-effective services in material and process/product simulation and testing, to aid in product design and manufacturing. Ben also started in 2006 the WIDL’ Seminars, to bring people of various technical backgrounds up-to-speed, in 1- materials and 2- product development through simulation and 3- testing, and the 4- correlation of numerical results to the “real world”. These are monthly accelerated training sessions, modular (for increased flexibility), for people involved with polymers, plastics, elastomeric (thermosets and TPEs).
Ben particularly helped all levels of the supply chain of the Rubber Industry (ingredient makers, rubber suppliers, compounders, tool and mold makers, machine builders, rubber manufacturers, rubber part users, OEMs) develop compounds, characterize materials, design and optimize products, device tools and orchestrate manufacturing processes, produce and test prototypes, and improve (computer-based) simulation tools at various levels (material modeling, geometry representations and meshing, application of loads and boundary conditions, and running nonlinear analyses).
Ben worked on developing novel machinery to characterize polymers for computer modeling along with software to post-process collected data into material models. He is now looking at closing the loop in the product development process in terms of recycling rubber products and making with recycled compounds new rubber products.
Ben belongs to various organizations in North America; also, he often publishes in SAE, SME, ACS (Society of Automotive Engineers, the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, the American Chemical Society), and often participates in conferences around the world on materials, product development, and manufacturing, and writes in journals and magazines like the Rubber World.