Increased pressure on manufacturing companies to develop and produce products that meet tightened requirements from customers and investors on shortened time spans require increased efficiency of the product development and the production preparation. Design automation is a powerful tool to increase the efficiency in these two processes.

The benefits of automating the production preparation process are shortened led-time, improved product performance, and ultimately decreased cost. Further, automation is beneficial as it increases the ability to adapt products to new product specifications with production preparations done in few or in a single step. During the automation process, knowledge about the production preparation process is collected and stored in company systems, thus allowing full control over the design of production equipments.

Finite element analyses (FEA) are often used to test product properties virtually. The process of setting up FEA is many times manual and not strictly formalized; the assumptions made in those calculations highly depend on the analysts’ former experiences and gut feeling. Sometimes there exist parametric FEA-models, but they are hard to interpret for others than the developers. It is beneficial to formalize and automate the process of developing such calculations in order to automate the production preparation of mature and variant-rich products where estimations and validations using FEA are demanded in the whole or parts of the design space. Automating the FEA-process for selected production methods makes the dedicated FEA-models more flexible and more transparent. It also makes them live longer and be more available for engineers that are not FEA-specialists. The FEA-specialists will have more time to solve general problems rather than focusing on instances of the product.

This work deal with the automation of FEA-based producibility analysis of aluminium tubes with several bends, as is a part of the production preparation of many products. The method proposed includes the usage of a KBE-system that handles knowledge objects that connect to auxiliary software applications. This is done in order to generate a design synthesis based on product specifications, to develop a geometrical model of the synthesis in a CAD-system, to generate mesh parts in a CAD-system, to set up and run a FEM-calculation based on the generated mesh, and finally to extract required results from the calculation result files. The complete process of bending the tubes several times is automatically synthesised and analysed.