Today's post comes from James Branagan another Application Expert here at IMAGINiT.....
I have had questions from customers about creating a rolled plate in Autodesk’s Advance Steel, as opposed to folded plates. Whilst Advance steel does not have a tool to create rolled plates directly there are some things we can do to approximate them.
The first option we have is to use the Folded Beam option.
- Draw an Arc and Copy it then select the width of the plate you want to create.
- On the Home tab > Objects panel, click the Folded Beam. This command can also be found on the Objects tab > Beams panel.
- Choose the Arc option
What the command asks for next is information about the location of the system axis line. For a curved plate like this, we should place the axis line in the center of the arc, both horizontally and vertically. Defining the start and end of the system axis line will determine the width of the curved plate.
- Choose a Center for the system Axis Line
- Click the Start and End of the system Axis Line
Once you have defined the system Axis Line, the Plate Definition dialog box will pop-up where you can further define your plate. All of the regular plate parameters can be defined here such as plate thickness, position and material.
As you can see from the above image, the plate is still not a smooth bend as you would expect to get with a rolled plate. Advance Steel has created small plates and joined them to approximate a curve.
You can obtain the same results with Conical Folded Plate command but with more versatility.
Using the Conical Folded Plate command, create a plate with two circles of the same diameter. Once created you can select any of the red connection lines to remove the association between one plate segment and an adjacent one.
Using the Conical Folded Plate command instead of the Folded Beam command, gives you the added versatility of being able to specify how many segments are used to approximate your curve as well as check the unfolding if necessary.
Comments