Western Pennsylvania ANSYS Users Group

Summer 2000 Meeting Report

Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2000 from 9:00 am - 3:30 pm

Where: ANSYS Headquarters in Southpoint, Canonsburg, PA

TOPIC:  Geometry "Healing" aka. CAD Repair

Meeting Summary (from Dave Johnson, Chairman)

  The bottom line with CADfix is: I was impressed. It may not repair everything automatically, but it then gives the user control so he can manually fix a few nasty problems. Their goal is to make model transfer better by reducing the model re-work time by 50-75% and I think that is reasonable (once you have had training on all the usages of CADfix). An example given was: an IGES file that came up with 2700 errors on the transfer.  After CADfix, there were14 corrections to be made manually.
  A really bad model may not be recovered - those cases need to go back to the original modeler, but many models can be "touched-up" in CADfix and be used.
  I also got the impression that the other product (CADfix for ANSYS) is a subset of the regular CADfix and doesn't come with all the capabilities. I think I'd recommend the regular CADfix product, probably with the option they call "Transform/Split"
  If you are in a routine of regularly needing to repair IGES files, the CADfix price of $5-$10k plus annual maintenance of 18-20% is not unreasonable.

  I've attached some of the presentations below, but be careful, some are large downloads !

  The User's Group presented a plaque to Ed Heald, group founder and president for 9 years.

Carl Izurieta, Eastern Region Manager, International TechneGroup Inc.
presenting CADfix & CAD/IQ: Interoperability Seminar

Steve Utterdyke, Applications Engineer, ITI

Demos on user-supplied IGES files:

  1. Steering knuckle (~730 kB)  translation & defeaturing for ANSYS, STL
  2. OEM-Erie models:
    • bellcrank (~343 kB) >  into .SAT files for CAD and .STL files
    • auto panel (~276 kB) > into .SAT files for CAD and .STL files
  1. Joy Manufacturing models:
    • axle (~414 kB) > into ANSYS, translation & defeaturing
    • linkage (~307 kB) > into ANSYS, translation & body splitting
Daniel P. Malone, Applications Specialist, CAD Repair 

Link here to see the Detailed Example presented (~3.8 MB)