(also in co-design with the customer)
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT LAB
WE REALIZE INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS
Over the years SOGO has retained and strengthened the high quality standard and the peculiarity of creating tailor made products on specific customer request, with the plus of a laboratory, SOGO LAB born and developed thanks to considerable investments in technology and highly specialized staff , specially established at the Frosinone production unit. Anyone can interact with the idea, propose solutions or improvements, cooperate in the definition of a project: the best solutions and results are obtained with the active involvement of customers. Participation in the development phases can take place in separate phases: from the initial definition of the requirements and the deepening of the possible innovations to the brainstorming of ideas, during the development of the product or in the last phases before the launch on the market. Participatory processes affirm a new way of doing business and relating to their customers: different situations are considered, scenarios that are sometimes unexplored, but which concur to consider different points of view, nuances and original details. The results are surprising, as they allow us to design tools that are more advantageous for customers and for the business: participatory co-design makes processes more fluid and faster, ensuring greater competitiveness on the market, because a true idea comes from the heart but is compared with reality.
CONCEPT DESIGN
Industrial concept design is a service of added value that SOGO is able to offer to the customer to respond – thanks to the knowledge of materials, innovations in the production process and a know-how built in over 50 years – to customer requests and specifications and increasingly stringent technical specifications, with the aim of reducing customer purchase costs. For SOGO, the concept design becomes a real art to pay due attention, as it allows you to open up to innovative ideas, which – following a normal design process – would risk to leave unpublished and unexpected ways. The results of a concept design work are often used as future scenarios and showcase of a research process, thus becoming the final result and not the initial one.
CO-DESIGN
The Co-design in the industrial field – valid for all SOGO outlet sectors – is simply the great technical capacity of SOGO perceived by the market, able to ensure that internal resources are called to “the client’s engineering table”, in when the same SOGO client is in the planning phase of his new projects and products. In this phase SOGO is able to support the customer’s engineering, in order to assist them in the best design choices for all rubber and plastic anti-vibration components.
In this stage – absolutely critical for the customer – SOGO is able to support the customer thanks to all the activities of: rapid prototyping, prototyping, laboratory tests on materials and finished products, as well as in the analysis of finite elements (FEM Analysis).
PRODUCT ENIGINEERING
In this phase corrections are made to the initial project aimed at optimizing the serial production process and the eventual maintenance of the finished product. Engineering and industrialization are the phases of product development that invest each item at the time of production. Engineering is the complete development of the project so that the product obtained guarantees the performance for which it was designed. Industrialization is the study of the production process, that is, the sequence of operations that allow the production of the product in compliance with the quality and quantity planned and in the containment of production costs. The product development phase inevitably passes through the prototyping of the product and the production of a limited number of pieces, for the verification of the production process, the testing of the product and any market tests.
SIMULATION
The complexity of the design of an elastomeric component can be met with a virtual simulation approach, able to guarantee a better performance of this component and of the final product. It is possible to predict in advance how the components will behave in real-life situations thanks to computer simulations (FEM analysis). In this way, the planning is verified well before the actual start of production, with the consequent guarantee of having chosen immediately the correct operations, resources and system configurations. Our simulation and production verification applications allow to:
- Detect and resolve potential problems early, when change management is simpler and less costly thanks to simulation;
- Reduce the need to perform physical tests, with a consequent reduction in the start times of automated systems;
- Evaluate variations within production processes and rhythms with a high degree of precision;
- Easily perform technical studies, including the ergonomic factors of human operations.
The assembly simulation and verification solution allows to simulate the interactions between assembly sequences, human activities and machining, in order to optimize the assembly processes before the actual production starts.
PROTOTYPING
RAPID AND STANDARD
The term prototype means the first example of a product to be developed, and it allows you to make preliminary considerations before it is released into production. Its construction, called prototyping, is therefore an important phase in the process of developing new products. The possibility of carrying out checks already in the early stages of product development allows for rapid improvements and changes. SOGO is able to support customers thanks to the realization of:
- Rapid prototypes, available thanks to silicone molds in one / two days, which perfectly simulate the geometry and hardness of the finished product;
- Standard prototypes, available thanks to the creation of “low volume” molds, which allow the product to be delivered in one week, both in the definitive material and in the definitive geometry.
The feasibility study of rubber products is a very important phase of work foreseen within the SOGO Lab. This phase is set to verify the feasibility and give answers to the technical specifications of the product: great attention to detail, maximum listening to the needs and to the objectives of the client involved in the co-design of the product. This is an analytical and creative phase that brings into play all the resources and skills of SOGO professionals; it lays the foundations for the project and provides the specific technical solutions that allow then to continue optimally in the following phases. The prototyping phase allows you to:
- have a quick feedback on the project;
- keep the design focused on the user;
- experiment with alternative designs;
- sovercome the problem of incomplete definition of requirements;
- correct any possible mistakes;
- refine existing features;
- introduce new features.
TESTING
SOGO has planned a long strategy aimed at providing the market – as well as manufactured products – with a customer support activity of engineering know-how and design, resulting from strong investments in laboratory equipment, in order to deliver high quality and provide reference customers with a laboratory testing service on raw materials, pre-finished materials and finished products. The structural and complementary verifications allow you to follow step by step the analysis of the parameters of feasibility, compliance with specifications, safety, resistance, couplings and aesthetic form, allowing you to continuously monitor the evolution of the project according to a correct path . All the material checks are carried out in the laboratory to guarantee a very high regularity of the designed prototypes. Testing is a process to identify the lack of correctness, completeness and reliability of the components being developed, and to evaluate if the functioning of the prototype and of the standard product meets all the requirements.
INSTRUMENTS
- Oscillating chamber rheometers with 5-sample automatic loader
- Mooney viscometer
- Analytical balance
- Electronic density meter
- Abrasion meter
- Hardness Testers ShA
- Hardness Testers IRHD
- Micro Hardness Testers IRHD
- Splitting machine for testing
- Dynamometer
- Air heaters
- Cold room (-40°)(-40°)
- FTIR with ATR in diamond and ATR in germanium
- MTS with climate chamber
- 3D Optical measuring device
- Prototype press
