Pick of the Week: Design the Best Seat in the Vehicle

By Anthony J. Lockwood

VISTAGY, Inc. (Waltham, MA) has announced version 2.0 of Seat Design Environment (SDE) 2.0, its 3D development environment for the design and manufacture of seats for the transportation interiors. VISTAGY asserts that SDE provides “the industry’s only complete engineering environment integrated directly into popular commercial 3D CAD systems for more efficiently managing all aspects of seat trim development—from conception, design and cost modeling to document generation and manufacturing.” Highlighting the enhancements in SDE 2.0 are new capabilities that provide engineers design feedback and manufacturing cost information early in development to help ensure that final seats meet specifications and deadlines.

SDE enables engineers to create from within their CAD application a single 3D virtual product definition of the seat architecture and cover—including all non-geometric data associated with the model, material specifications, stitch types, and sewing instructions. This single master CAD model can be used to share design detail across teams, obtain feedback on evolving design and cost data, and to generate critical manufacturing documentation. As a result, says VISTAGY, OEMs and suppliers can accelerate seat delivery time from months to days, eliminate physical prototyping, improve manufacturing accuracy, and assess how the trim interacts with the seat architecture and the entire interior.

With SDE 2.0, engineers can now obtain immediate feedback on seat manufacturing cost data by automatically exporting product definition detail from the master CAD file to cost model documents.  SDE 2.0 also provides a variety of design databases relevant to the seat development process. These user-customizable databases, which are launched from the CAD environment, contain lists of cover materials, seam types, needles, threads, standardized parts, and notes and specifications relevant to seat design.

Automatic document generation is also new to SDE 2.0. Here, SDE lets engineers automatically export and format detailed product data from the master model to such documents as engineering drawings, bills of materials, spreadsheets, Web pages, and quality planning forms.

For complete details on SDE 2.0, go to VISTAGY.