Ever since they began working together at Iowa State University, Abir Qamhiyah and Don Flugrad have taken on the thorniest of mechanical engineering problems. Together, the inventors have brought a half-dozen promising breakthrough ideas to the patent-pending stage — from a new type of automotive transmission and a better computer mouse to an implantable artificial kidney.

One of their toughest challenges, however, has recently shaped up into a company whose product they believe will revolutionize the way engineers classify and retrieve the parts-design information needed to manufacture things like John Deere tractors and Boeing 7E7 aircraft.

Their Ames-based company, CMnet Inc., which does business under the name of its primary product, CADSeek, will market a search engine that uses shapes, not words, to retrieve parts or assembly designs from databases that may contain millions of items.

“For large companies such as John Deere, the magnitude of these files becomes too large for one to be able to index and retrieve successfully,” said Qamhiyah, an assistant professor at ISU’s College of Engineering and the company’s president. “So there’s a wealth of engineering data that’s waiting there for them. And because the process is usually very difficult, they usually end up giving up on it and creating a duplicate, which is a waste of time and resources.”

According to one estimate, engineers spend about 20 percent of their time just trying to find archived design information, said Qamhiyah, who first began working on a solution as a graduate engineering student in 1992.

Qamhiyah, who had nearly completed her master’s degree in fluid mechanics and thermal systems at Kuwait University, had to flee her homeland with her family when Iraq invaded in 1990. Her subsequent work on computer aided design systems at the University of Toronto caught the attention of Jim Oliver, an ISU mechanical engineering professor, who recruited her to Iowa to continue work on the project.

“The reason why I started working on it was mainly because it was a very complicated and intriguing problem,” Qamhiya said. “How do you code shapes? How do you map it from the domain it exists in, in a three-dimensional space, into another domain that will lend itself to classification and retrieval?”

She made her first proposal for National Science Foundation backing for the project shortly after arriving at ISU as an assistant professor in 1996. In May 2003, the foundation awarded a project initiation grant. Qamhiyah and Flugrad subsequently secured $250,000 in first-round financing and a $10,000 grant from the Iowa Department of Economic Development.

The program, which is now being tested by both Deere & Co. and UGS Corp., a Texas-based CAD software maker with operations in Ames, is protected under two pending patents. Two key differences in their program make it better than any other approaches that have been tried, Flugrad said.

“These other approaches might well handle 100 parts, but when you get to 1,000 parts, 10,000 parts, half a million parts, the process bogs down, and you get to the point where there just are no computers fast enough and big enough to solve the problem in a finite length of time,” said Flugrad, a professor with 27 years at ISU and CADSeek’s vice president. “Whereas our process, it’s scalable, so that certainly it’s going to take more time for more parts, but it’s multiple times as long to do, and it can be done in a finite length of time.”

Additionally, CADSeek can catalog and search for assemblies as well as parts, and has a unique navigation system that allows users to zoom through a 3-D image of the entire database, which appears on the computer screen as clusters of spheres that represent families of parts or assemblies.

“We believe that our software does a much better job of showing the totality of the CAD database, which adds a great deal of value to the customer,” Fugrad said. “It’s not just a geometric search engine.”

UGS, which writes design software programs for 18 of the top 20 automakers, is currently testing CADSeek in-house to see how it might fit in with its products. The company also specializes in product lifecycle management software used by the automotive industry to manage processes and parts.

“So we’re really interested from two perspectives,” said Brett Harper, director of visualization technologies for UGS. “From the CAD designer workflow perspective, they want to start with a very similar part to what they want to design. And in this PLM space, it can allow a company to reduce the cost of a vehicle to more efficiently use their existing parts catalog,” which translates into introducing new products faster, he said.

After Deere and UGS test the software for about two months, CADSeek plans to license a full implementation of it to both companies. It will also begin marketing to other companies that make intensive use of computer-aided design, as well as other potential software resellers such as UGS that want to incorporate the product into their CAD software offerings.

“We’re working on all of these methods,” Qamhiyah said. “So we’re not limiting ourselves to one mode of distribution or the other.”

CADSeek received a convertible loan from the Wellmark Community Ventures Fund, which enabled it to begin product development. It later approached the Ames Seed Capital Group for additional financing. “Between the two, we were able to secure $250,000,” Qamhiya said.

In addition to a $50,000 convertible loan from the Ames Seed Capital Fund, the company also received $50,000 in startup financing from a group of five angel investors, said David Maahs, executive director of the Ames Economic Development Commission and the fund’s secretary.

“We feel the technology has great potential to help manufacturing companies organize their CAD files,” Maahs said. “We’ve been meeting with Don and Abir off and on for about the past year. We’ve been impressed with the developments they’ve made and the improvements in the technology.”

Based on market research it’s done, CADSeek estimates its product will sell for about $50,000 per central processing unit, and that a large company may need it installed on two to four CPUs for optimal performance.

Pricing their product has been just one of many new experiences for the two inventors-turned-entrepreneurs.

“The flavor that I’ve experienced in doing some of this type of work is that it is just as intriguing and exciting as the basic research part,” Qamhiyah said, “and I truly want to do more of it.” She is currently seeking a chief executive officer for the company, and is also in the processing of hiring some sales professionals.

“We’re both learning a lot of new things,” Flugrad said, “and it’s a very enjoyable process that we truly believe will be a major company, hiring lots of people and helping the economy. I only wish that I had started this sort of thing when I was younger.”