IMAGINiT Manufacturing Solutions Blog

Nested Break Out Views in Inventor Drawings

Sometimes you may have an Inventor assembly drawing where you would like to use a break out section to show part details deep within the assembly.  This usually means that more than one part are covering the detail you wish to show.  Inventor drawing can make quick work of this situation by using nested break out sections.

My model is an indexing gearbox assembly and I would like to show the key between the indexing gear and the drive shaft.  The indexing gear is under the cover and the key is under the indexing gear.  Lets get started.

Create an Inventor drawing of the assembly with the desired view.

Select the view, making sure it is highlighted in the browser, and select Create Sketch from the Place Views tab - Sketch panel.

You can use an sketching tool to create a connected boundary for the break out but I prefer an interpolated spline with numerous pick points to allow for quick boundary editing if it becomes necessary.

Finish you sketch and select the Break Out from the Place Views tab - Modify panel.  Identify the view by selecting inside the view bounding box.  You can also right click inside the bounding box and select Create View - Break Out if you desire.  The break out boundry sketch is selected automatically, if not the sketch is not closed.  Select the Depth option Through Part and select the part to be sectioned.  In my case it is the gearbox cover. Select OK to finish.

If you wish to change your break out boundry, expand the Break Out view in the Browser, and right click on the sketch and select edit.  If you used a spline for your boundry, this is a simple task of dragging points around in the sketch.

Next, repeat the complete process to create a break out section through the indexing gear to expose the internal key.

The last step to make this visually appealing, it to shade the view.  Right click inside the view bounding box and select Edit View.  Select Shaded from the Style section of the dialog box and OK to finish.  Of course you can do this anytime during the process but I feel it is easier to work on the drawing view in a wireframe style.

CFD Engineering

I was asked the other day by an engineer friend of mine “what is CFD engineering?”  I had to ask what he meant.  He said that his understanding of what my company does is CFD engineering.  And that he didn’t really get what we do. 

It certainly makes sense that many will not intuitively understand our consulting services when described as “CFD analysis consulting”.    Kind of leaves the listener without much detail.  (Unless, of course, that person is an engineer that deals with thermal or flow attributes daily and has been exposed to CFD analysis simulation software tools.  In that case they’re squarely in our circles anyway.)  So, I suppose having heard me describe our consulting business with CFD in there he put CFD engineering together and decided to ask the question.

So, the short conversation prompted me to write this about CFD Engineering.  First off, for anyone that just found their way to this page and is wondering what the letters CFD mean, here you go.  CFD is Computational Fluid Dynamics.  It’s the science of using computers to simulate fluid and thermal behavior.  Wikipedia describes it.

Think airflow through a laptop to cool the chips, a hair dryer blowing hot air, water moving through a valve or airflow over a race car. 

In one sense, CFD engineering might be considered the process of engineering or designing CFD methods or developing CFD software.  In another… our company, IMAGINiT, could be dubbed as doing CFD engineering in the sense that we use CFD software to solve design problems for our clients as a consulting service.

I’m very curious what engineers in the market think when they hear CFD Engineering?  What are your thoughts?

Recording a Section View Going Through an Assembly

 

I discovered today that the section view cutting plane is no longer tied to the face or plane selected at the time of placement. That and there is no parameter created when typing in an offset.

Go back a few releases and you could place a half section view on an origin plane and then, using constraints, drive the cutting plane through the assembly. This could then be recorded, from the Drive Constraint dialog, creating a sweet animated section plane eating through the assembly. However the section plane now stays in place "relative to the sectioned parts" as things are moved around.. Today I was asked how to achieve this again. These section views do not transfer into the Inventor Studio environment so what to do?

I decided to use iLogic to drive an assembly extrusion and it ended up working pretty well. Make sure to first extrude through every part so they are all included in the assembly feature.

Then name a parameter that can later be referenced in an iLogic rule.

For the single part we used 3^rd part software and simply recorded the screen. However while creating this article, my 300+ part Lego assembly was talking nearly two minutes between cuts. That doesn't make for the smoothest of videos. I decided to have the While loop export a screen grab and then used Windows Movie Maker to string them all into a movie. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/Windows-Live/movie-maker#t1=overview

If you plan on doing multiple cuts through your assembly remember to save a View Rep first! If you crash or happen to rotate or pan the view will be different between the animations.

iLogic Code Used

Parameter("CutDepth")	=	0

oCount = 1000

'save iso view To jpg

oCount = oCount + 1

imagedoc = ThisDoc.PathAndFileName(False) & oCount & ".jpg"

oCamera = InventorVb.Application.ActiveView.Camera 'current iso view

'oCamera.fit

oCamera.apply

InventorVb.Application.ActiveView.SaveAsBitmap(imagedoc,1680,1050 )

While   Parameter("CutDepth") < 150

        Parameter("CutDepth") = Parameter("CutDepth") + .50

        InventorVb.DocumentUpdate()

        iLogicVb.UpdateWhenDone = True

        'save iso view to jpg

        oCount = oCount + 1

        imagedoc = ThisDoc.PathAndFileName(False) & oCount & ".jpg"

        oCamera = InventorVb.Application.ActiveView.Camera 'current iso view

        'oCamera.fit

        oCamera.apply

        InventorVb.Application.ActiveView.SaveAsBitmap(imagedoc,1680,1050 )

End While

I had a lot of fun creating this animation and I hope to see some of yours as well. Feel free to post a link to your own YouTube section cut video.

IMAGINiT CFD Consulting – Welcome Greg Keller

We love when we add to the team.  So when we do we want everyone to know.  It’s exciting and it means that we’re doing what we set out to do: be a value to our customers and have a positive impact on people around us.

We’re excited to announce our newest team member, Greg Keller.  He just joined our CFD consulting team to fill an important position in business development.  He lives in Rome, NY and has worked for a number of years as an account manager in the CAE/design world.  In fact, he came from another division of IMAGINiT where he managed business development in New York for the last few years.

Greg will work with many of our clients and prospective clients to identify where and how flow and thermal simulation design services can impact their business and overcome pressing design challenges.  He’s already settled in and making things happen.  Greg can be reached @ gkeller@rand.com or by phone @ (315) 271-9713.

Superman Syndrome on a CFD for Filter Design project

Have you ever noticed that consultants seem to say “yes” to everything? Why is that? I don’t want to walk away from business any more than the next guy, but it better be business that fits my capabilities and expertise. Otherwise, I’ll spend more money than I’m earning. Where’s the business sense in that? I like to focus on problems we can knock out of the park.

Consultants certainly walk a fine line to secure business now and then. To get better we have to stretch ourselves, but at the same time know when to say no. I’m starting to realize, however, that the product development community has an expectation that CFD consultants actually CAN solve anything. Last Thursday we were defining a project scope to apply CFD for filter design optimization. The CFD analysis would be for a self-cleaning air filter housing with blasts of supersonic flow pulsing numerous times over a few milli-seconds. Wow! That one gets complex in a hurry. I politely said our services are not the best fit for his design. You would have thought I told him his application was the kryptonite that was the ultimate weakness of Superman. He was astonished by our transparency to be clear. He appreciated it for sure.

Don’t you think consultants ought to stick to their strengths and walk away when it doesn’t make sense? After all, isn’t that why we hire consultants anyway? For their strengths!

Go with the flow – Heat transfer without heat

If you’re around CFD simulation for any length of time you’ll see there are many tricks of the trade that make CFD analysis sing. You’ll further observe the most effective users are well versed in methods steeped in a bag of tricks. My favorite and certainly, from my experience, the single biggest time saver in heat transfer optimization is to run the simulation without using “heat transfer”. Yes, perfectly intuitive! Hang in with me… 

CFD software programs such as Fluent, CFX, Star-CD, Flotherm, CFdesign and others include features to enable flow and thermal to be calculated simultaneously. This means the program uses calculations from one to influence the other. There’s even a name for it: Conjugate Heat Transfer. An illustration of this is calculating buoyant airflow (natural convection) as a device heats the air environment. The program uses the heating of the air to calculate the speed and direction of the airflow. Meanwhile as the airflow velocity increases the program accounts for the cooling effects of the increased speed of the moving air across the same device creating the convective flow in the first place and so on…

Here’s the point. Just like CFD programs can “couple” the solution they can also “de-couple” the solution and run one without the other. This is a powerful feature that when leveraged in the right design simulation saves enormous amounts of time.

Think ovens, heaters, process equipment, industrial dryers, electronics cooling with fans, air handlers, and a hundred other similar types of products involving fan, pump, compressor or blower driven flow for heating or cooling. Designs that heat or cool with forced fluids like air or water are heavily dependent upon even flow distribution for good thermal performance. Consider using flow only on your next thermal project to improve the flow distribution first. Good heat transfer performance depends on it. This simplifies the approach and save tons of time! 

A Breakdown of the Features inside IMAGINiT Utilities for Vault Client

This tool is free and available on our Portal website. http://portal.imaginit.com/ It adds a number of features to the Vault Client that increases the functionality of the Vault Client. Each of the features are explained below.

CFD Analysis Consulting - interview on LifeUpfront CAE Blog

Check out our recorded interview on LifeUpfront.com.  Ryan Stamm, Director of Business Development for
the IMAGINiT CFD services group joins Jeff Waters on LifeUpfront.com.  Ryan discusses our unique and incredibly successful approach to CFD analisys consulting services.

Check it out... http://lifeupfront.com/2013/06/25/ryan-stamm-imaginit-cfd-consulting-rand/

 

Creating Section Views in Inventor Drawings at Odd Angles

Sometimes you are required to create a section view in an Inventor drawing through features that do not lie on the X or Y axis.  Normally you would hover over a feature and track either vertical or horizontal to find the first section line point.  In this case, that is impossible.  This short video shows how to create this section.

 

Checking AutoCAD Files into Vault for the 1st Time

Ah memories.  I remember when I used to organize all my documents into manilla folders and pendaflex in my desk.  I did this when I first started at IMAGINiT over 7 years ago.  I soon found out that I really don't put a lot in pendaflex at work.  I started putting things on disk and storing them electronically and backing them up.  If I had left them on my desk, then they would tend to get coffee stains or notes jotted on them that had nothing to do with the document.  I also remember my first file check in to Autodesk Vault with my CAD data to keep electronic coffee stains and moments of genius changes and then reversions because they werent such a bright idea free of ruining my archived and saved data.

This video brought to us from TheVaultKnowsAll YouTube user will teach you about your first AutoCAD checkin to Vault and also name drops the courseware our sister company Ascent makes to help new users understand the Vault environment better and to get up to speed on this free tool that ships with the Product Design, Factory Design, and Standard Design Suites that Autodesk currently ships out.

 

If this isn't your first Autodesk Vault rodeo, be sure to check out the YouTube account for more great information about Autodesk Vault and be sure to pick up some great courseware from Ascent.