A library of parts to use in mechanical designs.

What is it about?

Mechanical engineers designing the complex machines used on production lines will include a wide variety of components in their designs. Many of these components will be designed and manufactured by suppliers. However, the designer still needs to include an accurate representation of them in the design to make sure that everything fits together correctly. Where are company is using many thousands of different parts, simply listing them all would make selecting a particular part very difficult. In this paper, parts used by a company over a few years have been grouped in a similar way to the way biologists group living organisms. Computer models of the 20% of parts most frequently used have then been placed into a database. The grouping of the parts makes locating them intuitive and simple. This has significantly reduced the time required for designers to find the correct model and has hence increased design efficiency.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Part libraries for items such as fasteners and bearings are common place and may be available as either standard features of CAD packages or as add-on features. However, there are many more parts that a small to medium enterprise may wish to use. A bespoke part library not only reduces design time but allows for standardization of parts and hence reduced costs for purchasing and assembly.