WIRED Article Cites VLM to Improve Product Design & Reliability

Nov. 1, 2012 - PRLog -- Today's manufacturing companies face a significant challenge as they work to balance the demands of the marketplace for better performing products against the need to bring new products to market faster, cheaper, and with greater reliability than ever before.

This month's issue of Wired Magazine (http://www.wired.com/design/2012/10/ff-why-products-fail/all) features an article addressing this challenge and discusses how computational simulation tools such as VEXTEC Virtual Life Management® (VLM) can help companies deal with this challenge.

Consider one of the implications of the article, that over-engineering is a result of under-informing. When you don't have enough information you are forced to use higher safety factors in design, over engineer and over build your products.  VEXTEC addresses the under-informing, the underlying cause of over-engineering.  Better information, from VEXTEC modeling, means less over-engineering and that means less cost.  With VLM manufacturers can evaluate design and material alternatives in a more meaningful way than has been possible with traditional reliability projection methods while reducing your physical testing requirements and cost.

VLM has been used to simulate changes in design, material processing, and usage scenarios on over 100 successful projects for commercial and government clients over the last twelve years.  We have resolved in-service reliability issues and accelerated product development processes for a variety of fatigue and corrosion applications.  VLM has been applied to many different products including aerospace, commercial aviation, marine, automotive, electronics and medical devices, each time simulating thousands of individual units as they are either tested in the laboratory or used in customer applications.

VEXTEC was founded in 2000 and has developed its patented technology primarily through Department of Defense Small Business Innovative Research programs. VEXTEC offers three different services to a variety of commercial and government customers.  In addition to developing its VLM Software, VEXTEC Laboratory Group (http://gas-turbine-testing.com) provides gas turbine testing services while VFA Engineering Group (http://failure-analysis-durability.com) provides failure analysis and component re-design services.