SUPPORTINC CAD SYSTEMS WITH EXTERNAL LIBRARIES TO IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF THE MECHANICAL DESIGN PROCESS

Designer of industrial mechanical systems encounters great challenges to develop work styles and performance methods of improving the productivity, since the use of advanced technologies became the major feature of now days. AutoCAD drafting package has been widely used for engineering drawings and designs. Building special libraries that contain components such as; standard parts, machine elements, tolerances, machining symbols, and surface roughness can surely provide time efficient automatic procedure, which contribute positively to the productivity and performance. The libraries that contain these components are built using simple and clear hierarchy classification, which includes a large number of mechanical items, and design aid tools. The AutoCAD package has been modified using shape language programming in such a way that a new pull down menu is added to the AutoCAD interface which contain all the required design aid tools so that users can easily select the proper required components instead of using traditional methods. Selected mechanical designs have been drawn three times; manually, using traditional AutoCAD, and using the external library technique. This paper showed that the external libraries technique has improved the productivity and performance by 270% compare to the manual drawing and 155.5% compare to the traditional AutoCAD.