Smarter sheet metal software cuts design time, smoothes manufacturing handoffs
A walkthrough shows that sheet metal enhancements in Pro/ENGINEER® Wildfire® 3.0 deliver more streamlined software, with simpler user commands.
Sheet metal 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 sheet metal 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 sheet metal 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.
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 3.0 features consolidated HTML reports showing all design rule violations, such as the one shown here — a cut that’s too close to the edge of the part. These model info reports help designers avoid expensive secondary operations and inefficient manufacturing process plans for sheet metal parts.
For today’s design engineers, the challenge is not only to create high-quality, highly accurate sheet metal designs, but to do so 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 sheet metal 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 sheet metal design capability also gives greater control over key aspects of the application.
Here are just a few examples 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 miter cuts, yet at the same time gives you control over details such as 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 sheet metal reports—A single report now 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, which indicate violations in user-specified sheet metal design rules.
Other UI shortcuts—PTC engineers have consolidated the frequently used Cut command, so the sheet metal 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 designers 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. That extra time savings 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 stylized, much smaller — or both,” says Brian Thompson, product manager for PTC. “Pro/ENGINEER Sheetmetal Design has always been effective at enabling user creativity. For instance, with Pro/ENGINEER, the fully formed 3D model and the flat pattern are the same model, and this model will update automatically at any time, regardless of whether the changes are implemented in the flat or fully formed state.
“Now, with the new enhancements, we continue the overall Pro/ENGINEER strategy of improving productivity by cutting mouse clicks and making the software even more intuitive,” he says. “And, at the same time, giving users more control, where and when they need it.”
Typically, this is as far as a potentially great homegrown invention gets — rarely does an idea go from the drawing board into design, much less into production. No one, it seems, is interested.
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