The case for a dedicated design, manufacture and test solution for wire harnesses
Pity the poor wire harness, so complex to design and equally complex to manufacture. The strands of wire found in all planes, trains and automobiles tend to be improvised rather than designed. The wires are often inelegantly trussed and snaked through gaps not intended for them. Their physical form may be unimportant to the electrical engineer, who only sees them in schematic form, and to the mechanical engineer entrusted with how all the other parts fit together. Often, the wire harness only gets attention when it fails.
And they fail often, according to Kishore Boyalakuntla, GM of Cadonix. As much as 20% of wire bundles are scrapped during testing. There’s a big chance for error when you connect so many pins in one connector to the connectors on the other end — or ends with splices, splits, in some cases.
Boyalakuntla has learned a lot about wiring since his days at SolidWorks and Berkshire Grey, a robotics company. The key to success is a single source of truth from design to manufacturing.
A wire harness not working in the field causes unimaginable problems with product recalls. Should the defect be found in the field, a $500 wire harness can be a $5,000 service charge to replace, said Boyalakuntla.
Boyalakuntla offers Cadonix Arcadia products as a solution for wire harness problems. This intuitive, groundbreaking cloud-based platform empowers engineers with a comprehensive suite of tools for electrical design, all accessible from any web browser. No bulky software installations, complex licensing, nor sluggish updates. Arcadia’s innovative architecture leverages the cloud for seamless scalability and instant access to the latest features. Create schematics, simulate circuits, design wiring harnesses, and conduct design rule checks and more – all from a web browser, anywhere, anytime. Arcadia streamlines your entire design workflow. From initial concept to final harness manufacturing, engineers have everything they need at their fingertips.
Core competency of the Arcadia Design Suite
- Schematic design and layoutÂ
- Harness design and formboard layout
- Simulation and analysis
- MCAD integrations
- Documentation and reportingÂ
- Collaboration and version controlÂ
- Cost optimization and harness quoting
- API integration
- Integration with PLM/ERP systemsÂ
- Smart testing and manufacturing
- Parts services
The design is 2D, however. We have MCAD plugins with fantastic API’s, said Boyalakuntla. Cadonix gets the wiring lengths from MCAD, and after designing the wire harness in Cadonix products, Arcadia, shares the bundle diameters and other reports to MCAD to automatically update the wiring routes, to check of interference, bend radiuses and visualize final assembly.
The 3D visualization of the wire harness in the final assembly, as manufactured remains an unchecked box. Yet perhaps in the future, we will see a software application capable of snaking a wire bundle between components and showing it in place — not the ideal representation of the wire harnesses found in current MCAD applications. Current practices call for channels where wiring when space is critical, such as in automobiles, but sometimes, a passageway for wiring is left to chance, requiring rework for mechanical and electrical engineers.
Besides, it would take a supercomputer, said Boyalakuntla. The amount of detail required to model wires and pins, plus the organic shapes the wire bundles would take, would overtax a spline-based modeler.
About Cadonix
The U.K. based Cadonix was founded by Andrew Armstrong, a chartered engineer. Re:Build Manufacturing, based in Framingham, Mass., states as its goal nothing less than the revitalization of manufacturing in the U.S, acquired Cadonix.
