CATI Tech Notes

Open House - See the Connex350 3D printer in action

Join us August 10, 2010 from 12pm-5pm for an Open House featuring the Connex350 3D printer by Objet Geometries.  CATI's resident 3D printing experts will be on hand to introduce you to the latest arrival to our Buffalo Grove Headquarters, the Connex350 3D printer by Objet.  Be the first to see this Connex350 in action. Stop by to ask questions and see parts being printed live or come in for one of the scheduled presentations. 

Register for this event at http://www.cati.com/catiphp/events/event-register.php?CourseID=11126

Presentation Schedule:
1pm – Objet Presentation
3pm – Objet Presentation

We hope to see you there.

For more information on CATI and Objet 3D printing, visit our website at http://www.cati.com/products/rapid-prototyping/rp-3d-printing.html

Jim TeDesco

Marketing Coordinator

Computer Aided Technology

NAFEMS Benchmarks!

Who is NAFEMS?

National Agency for Finite Element Method and Standards (NAFEMS) is a non-profit organization to promote safe and reliable use of finite element methods. Engineering community has always been concerned with accuracy stress analysis codes. NAFEMS's efforts concentrate on developing benchmarks for a variety of codes.The software industry has adopted these tests as a method of improving and verifying the accuracy of codes.

SolidWorks Simulation has NAFEMS Benchmarks

 

SolidWorks Simulation has built NAFEMS benchmark for you to study. Each benchmark is solved and the user can try out the same using Simulation code. This ensures, every version of SolidWorks Simulation is ready to meet your engineering challenges.  Let's Design innovative products....

 

 

Rajat Trehan

Product Manager - Design Validation

Computer Aided Technology Inc.

It's All About Workarounds! Really? Yes Really!

In my experience it’s all about workarounds. Isn’t it? I mean really let’s think about it. In everyday life if there isn’t a given path or answer what do we do (especially designers and engineers)? We work around it. I can’t remember the last time something went off without a hitch or some sort of a “bump in the road. It isn’t supposed to be smooth. As the type of personality that expects perfection in most situations, I have come to understand that in order to live up to my expectations, I‘ve come up with a workaround for just about everything. Including the word count for a blog article (be “wordy”)

There is always a means to an end and this totally rings true in this statement. “When you need to drive a nail in, everything looks like a hammer”. So keeping this in mind, I had an interesting request the other day for an easy way to overlay a “featured” part over a “de-featured” part on a print in an isometric view. It took me 2 seconds to reply “no problem”. But as I thought of my work-around on the fly, there was the proverbial “stick in the spokes” issue. You can’t do an Alternate Position View in a part drawing. Doh!! Ok, we can make this up as we go and then the wheels start going and I take a sip (gulp) of coffee and the next thing ya know here it is:

• Create a part with 2 configurations- 1 for your “featured” part, one for your “de-featured” version.

• Insert this part into a new assembly 2 times “fixed” and specify the configuration for the correct instance.

• Open a new drawing using your assembly as the parent. Insert a view; I’ll use isometric for this example.

• Make sure you specify a reference configuration as the “top level” view. (this is one of my favorite enhancements for 2010 BTW)

• Insert an “Alternate View” and shoes the other configuration. This view will be in the “hidden lines view” visible. You have the ability to select a predefined configuration and this is my preferred method.

•  So in the end what we have is a laid-over style look of a “featured” part and “de-featured” part with a pretty simple procedure and just using the tools already provided to us in a slightly different fashion.

 Hope this helps!

Todd Werginz

Technical Analyst

Computer Aided Technology