Sheetmetal design is a critical
part of the product
development process
because the quality of the design
greatly impacts everything –
manufacturability, product quality,
price, styling, speed-to-market –
everything. Once that sheetmetal is
cut, there's no turning back, which
puts a great deal of pressure on
design engineers to get the design
'right the first time'.
For consumer products that
feature metal enclosures or
components – such as computers,
metal office furniture, and virtually
any product that houses
electronics – the sheetmetal
design can literally mean the
difference between profit and loss.
Perhaps, the greatest impact is
seen with downstream
manufacturing efficiency; higher
quality designs flow smoothly
through manufacturing, while
flawed designs usually become an
expensive bottleneck in the
product's path to manufacturing,
assembly and ultimately, sales.
For today's design engineers, the
challenge is not only to create
high-quality, highly accurate
sheetmetal designs, but also to do
it quickly, so that the new products
get to market in the shortest
timeframe possible.
From nine features to just one
In response to this need for greater
speed and quality of design, PTC
added new intelligence to the
sheetmetal design function in
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0. Now,
design engineers can use just one
feature to create the same
geometry that previously required
six-to-nine features. This new
sheetmetal design capability also
gives you unprecedented control
over key aspects of the application.
Few of the new capabilities:
Smarter walls and flanges:
With
the new enhancements, the Flange
tool now lets you create complex
flanges and boxes with multiple
walls. The Flange feature employs a
smart geometry engine that
understands complex intersections
and can propose mitre cuts, yet at
the same time gives you control
over details like the dimensions of
welding gaps. This saves significant
time over the previous method,
which required a dozen features
and took 10 minutes or more; now,
using just one feature, it takes
about a minute.
Browser-based sheetmetal
reports:
A single report replaces
the multiple reports previously
required to report on the K-factor,
Y-factor and bend tables. The new
report puts all appropriate
information into the same place
and features hotlinks that let you
explore the model detail in the
event of exception flags that
indicate violations in user specified
sheet metal design rules.
Other UI shortcuts:
PTC engineers
have consolidated the frequentlyused
Cut command, so the
sheetmetal command is now able
to anticipate the designer's intent,
as it does in the 3D model.
More time for creativity
These new enhancements will save
considerable time, most notably in
two key areas: by cutting the
number of mouse clicks, and by
shortening or eliminating learning
curves for certain operations. The
extra time saved will come in very
handy, especially in finding
innovative ways to design today's
highly complex products. "This
[version of Pro/ENGINEER] gives
users more time to think creatively,
and that's especially important
today, when many products are
becoming more stylised,much
smaller or both," according to
....CONTD
