Interface with Mathcad? 2

[transmissiontowers]

We typically use ACAD LT 2d to draw our transmission towers parts and pieces and wanted to get into 3d solid models to check clearances when we increase member sizes in existing towers. We are evaluating solid edge and solid works and trying to see which one is best for what we need. SW seems to interface with Mathcad to drive some of the dimensions.

The SE salesman says it will do the same. So if we have a Mathcad app that does some calculations, can it drive the inputs for a part in solid edge?

I'm not a Mathcad user, but some others in the office use it and are leaning to solid works. I saw the solid edge demo and was impressed and I am leaning that way.

I'll bet the topic of which is best has been asked and answered many times, but I started here. Any thoughts?

_____________________________________
I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[beachcomber]

If the salesman says it will do it get him to demonstrate it on a real-world example.
Never trust what a salesman tells you - and that goes for ANY cad system.

bc.
2.4GHz Core2 Quad, 4GB RAM,
Quadro FX4600.

Where would we be without sat-nav?

 

[KENAT]

Agree with beach - have the sales guy (or his tech guy) do an example for you, and as beach says try to make sure it's not some canned example.

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[swertel]

MathCAD doesn't interface with anything but Pro/E anymore, since PTC bought MathCAD from Mathsoft. I'm afraid both vendors are yanking your chain.

But, both software vendors do take input from MS Excel and MathCAD still outputs to Excel. So you could get to either CAD system from MathCAD using Excel as a mediator, if you really wanted to.

--Scott

http://wertel.eng.pro

 

[transmissiontowers]

Thanks for the replies. I was going to give both SE and SW the same set of drawings and have them produce a solid model to get them familiar with what we will be using them for. I would then invite them separately over and give a different but similar set of drawings and have them create a model in front of us and note the time required. Our transmission towers are pretty simple structures of rolled angle shapes connected by bolts so I think either one package should be able to do the job.

We are a company divided. One part adopted Microstation for drawing up standards including T-line hardware parts. Another part uses Autocad to produce the tower drawings.

I read that SE will open DGN drawing files while SW will not and both will open DWG files

_____________________________________
I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[beachcomber]

Yes, Solid Edge will open microstation dgn files, although check on the versions.
Your method of evaluation looks pretty good to me, although don't just rely on modelling time as a basis.
Also ask them to create and annotate a drawing, then modify the model (possibly changing section profiles?) and update the drawing.
Also look into BOM production.

bc.
2.4GHz Core2 Quad, 4GB RAM,
Quadro FX4600.

Where would we be without sat-nav?

 

[transmissiontowers]

For my part, the production of drawings is not so important as seeing where the collisions are. We have bolt heads and nuts that attach angles together and the nut or bolt head will interfere with the inside fillet of the angle as will the angles that frame into the corner posts at an angle and need to be clipped.
The other problem with drawing a transmission tower's members to scale is you have a 3 inch wide member that is 30 feet long. It has 2 bolts on each end, one in the center, and a couple between the center and ends. You have 5 feet of length with no holes then they are 2 inches apart at the ends. We traditionally compress the white space and make the members proportional and exaggerate the width so we can show the bolt gage line. It is a very specialized industry where very few members are at 90° to each other, but it is the greatest example of the minimum amount of steel holding up the greatest load. I'm in the hurricane wind area where we can go 50 years between maximum wind loading so the towers are at 20% of capacity for most of their lives.
Sorry for the long winded lecture, but I'm an Engineer and can't help myself.

_____________________________________
I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[KENAT]

transmissiontowers Solid Edge has 'breaklines' that will you allow to do similar in your drawings with respect to leaving out buts.

As well as technically what each software can & can't do you may want to take into account how much market share they have, both globally & locally, and consider the impact that may have on your choice. If one is significantly more popular it may be easier to find experienced users, of course, it will be easier for your current staff to leave once trained etc.

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[beachcomber]

Attached example of broken view on a 10m long section of 150x75 channel.
You can add as many breaks as you want.
Thanks for the background info - it makes it much easier to provide help when we know how you may be using Solid Edge - and other peoples jobs always seem more interesting than your own.

bc.
2.4GHz Core2 Quad, 4GB RAM,
Quadro FX4600.

Where would we be without sat-nav?

 

[beachcomber]

OOPS - forgot the attachment.

bc.
2.4GHz Core2 Quad, 4GB RAM,
Quadro FX4600.

Where would we be without sat-nav?

 

[transmissiontowers]

Thanks for the example. The other group that would be using SE or SW does more of probably what it was intended for by modeling solid parts of T-Line hardware. These are sometimes cast aluminum and the vendor will not or cannot provide a computer model of the part. They need to draw the part and have an example of it to measure and they now use MicroStation to do the drawing, but the parts are so complicated with curves and no sharp edges. These pieces are on the hot end of a 345,000 volt T-Line so sharp edges produce too much RF noise and corona.

So if we had a laser scan of the part can SE or SW do a surface fit between all the 1000's of points? We do something similar on the T-Line where a laser in a helicopter scans the ground and picks up points on the wires so we can get the correct catenary for our line modeling software.

If it weren't too expensive to get a laser scan of a part, it would speed up the 3D modeling.

_____________________________________
I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[beachcomber]

There is nothing in SE to import point cloud data (not sure about SW), although the scanning software may be able to output a surface model.
There is, however, software available that will allow you to convert the point cloud data into SE.
One example would be Point Cloud, from Sycode (300 - 400$) (

http://www.sycode.com)

- they also have various translators for SE.

bc.
2.4GHz Core2 Quad, 4GB RAM,
Quadro FX4600.

Where would we be without sat-nav?

 

[transmissiontowers]

Thanks, I figured it was possible. I am almost ashamed to admit what the other group will be using the solid model for. If we were reverse engineering the casting to go into production, it might be palatable. The guy in charge of the other group is a super nit picker. All these man-hours of 3d modelling to draw some parts are going into a "Standards Book" to show our employees how to assemble the parts and how they attach to the Transmission Tower. Now the field people have been assembling these same parts for 20 years and know how to do it. To me it is a colossal waste of man-hours, but he wants absolute perfection in the drawings. They have even gone as far as drawing in MicroStation the parting line from the casting process so the drawn part will be more "real". He is also a nut on bolt threads. They have to be the right pitch and diameter and drawn in 3d. The correct amount of thread projection must be shown above the nut. I doubt this much effort went into the space shttle.

_____________________________________
I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[KENAT]

If he deliberately wants the threads actually modeled in 3d then I'm guessing he's an idiot. Modeled threads are a massive overhead and negatively impact PC performance immensely.

If you're looking at scanning stuff and putting the model in CAD and being able to do stuff with it then Solid Edge with its Synchronous Technology may have a big advantage over Solid Works.

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[transmissiontowers]

Odd behavior with the notification feature. I got an eMail that donceod (Mechanical) had replied at 3:52 am this morning and beachcomber (Mechanical) replied at 5:08 am but there were no replies here.

And to KENAT, yes he is an idiot for wasting so much effort on meaningless details but the PC running MicroStation is a workstation class box with double quad core CPU's and four 22" wide flat screen LCD monitors with a bunch of ram although with Win XP 32 bit I don't think the programs can access anything beyond around 3Gb.

_____________________________________
I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.

 

[beachcomber]

XP 32 will only let you use 3GB of RAM maximum so modelling threads is going to kill the machine eventually, especially if you have a load of them in an assembly - trust me, I've seen it when some idiot modelled the thread on a bolt.
I've even seen someone put GKN and 8.8 on the head!!
The helix is probably the feature that increases file size and compute times the most.
That goes for any cad system, and has always been the case for 3D.
I was told 20 years ago - don't use a helix unless you have to.
Thin wall (shell) features are another example, but not nas bad.
By the way, I wouldn't take much notice of the times I'm in the UK and this was posted at 5:18pm

bc.
2.4GHz Core2 Quad, 4GB RAM,
Quadro FX4600.

Where would we be without sat-nav?

 

[HDS]

SW has some nice tools for reverse engineering or using STL files as parts. There is even a $5000 scanner that interfaces directly with SW. This is not a priority for SE but as others have said there are 3rd party tools for this.

For what you are doing you probably don't even need solid models. STL files or some other point could format would be fine.

As already said never model threads unless you need them to program the CNC (most of them don't need it because they use caned routines for threading). Every cad package has a cosmetic thread feature to give you the right call outs on drawings.

 

[KENAT]

New Posttransmissiontowers, I think there was some trimming of the thread - best not to ask too much more.

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[transmissiontowers]

Yes, I figured that some spam appeared in the thread and the post was deleted.

_____________________________________
I have been called "A storehouse of worthless information" many times.