Engineering Support from Concept to Production

I3E is perfectly suited to assist your company's engineering needs every step of the way, in every part of your product cycle, from research, through early technological development, advanced development and early prototypes, to production prototypes and into production.

At I3E, we can leverage a large variety of abilities which allows us to support our customers engineering needs in many aspects.  I3E supports hardware development, design, simulation and evaluation, fabrication, and test. We comprehend and have capability and resources to complete high end computer simulations such as FEA, CFD, and others. I3E can provide you with substantial knowledge in stress, strain, and structural integrity, heat and mass transfer, chemical reacting flows and catalysis, two phase flows and phase change, as well as a wide range of solid/solid and solid/fluid interactions. We have a long history of exposure to high temperature steels and their stress/strain, fatigue, and creep behavior, in addition to the more common low temperature steel applications. Ceramics and coatings are no strangers to us.

I3E has been involved in hardware testing for many years. We have experience in selecting instrumentation, setting up laboratory and hardware tests, provide supporting analysis for test setup and test result expectation, and evaluation of test data against targets and simulated outcomes.

Last but not least, I3E has a vast working knowledge base in Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), Robust Optimization, and Six Sigma problem solving, honed through many projects. We are competent to engage in every step of your technology or production development cycle. Most medium to large companies have their processes in place, usually fully integrated into their Six Sigma process, and we have worked with several Technology Development Processes (TDB), Advanced Development Processes (ADP), or Production Development Processes (PDP). Of course, every company will have their own acronyms. Smaller companies may not have such processes in place to their full extent. We are comfortable to work in every environment and will adapt to customers needs.

The two schematics below show much simplified processes. In essence, first there needs to be recognition that there is opportunity for required improvement, and that is the hard part. Once that decision has been made, we must analyze the current baseline to understand and quantify where we are in order to set targets and metrics and compare to product requirements and voice of customer. This step is often neglected or glanced over with little care, but it is so essential to final success. After the baseline evaluation, we will brainstorm and develop concepts. These concepts must be evaluated objectively against the baseline as well as against each other. Various tools are available to facilitate the process. With the best concept chosen, hopefully there will be one, engineering analysis, simulation, and design iterations will lead to manufacturing prints and prototypes will be fabricated and tested. Test results will be openly evaluated, compared to simulation and target expectations and metrics, and if all went well, the customer will have a new and more competitive design. This step might be iterative to find the best solution, and robust optimization can be required.