Best Program for Modeling Silicon Sleeves

[s0hxy]

I am currently in the EPCM industry and was just recently approached to model and manufacture (outsource) silicon sleeves. What is the best software in order to accomplish this? I am familiar with Unigraphics NX 3.0(FEA and Free Form Modeling. Also, any tips on how one would go about initial set-up?

Thanks in advance

 

[hudson888]

I presume that these sleeves are a tubular product of sorts, how flexible are they, do you need to express that flexibility, and if so in what ways?

NX will model any static geometry you care to nominate. There is a feature called deformable parts that may provide for a range of simple deformations. Very complex deformations will probably challenge any CAD system but it doesn't hurt to try. We may be able to surprise you.

Any further info about you product would be helpful

Cheers

Hudson

 

[s0hxy]

Yes, these sleeves are mostly tubular in shape. My goal would be to model these and provide my design to a manufacturing plant. I have a few questions:

1) Would I model the solid object that the sleeve would go around first. Then extract the solid object leaving a thin shell and take it from there.

2) Also another concern would be this - would the sleeve have to be smaller than the dimensions of the solid tubular object as it would be required to fit tightly around the object?

This is very new to me but definitely very interesting. Any suggestions on this would be great help.

Thanks

 

[hudson888]

What you can do up to a point is to model the inside and then shell the thing to a negative value to create a hollow object wrapped perfectly to the original. So it you are going to put a 1 mm thick sleeve on a 100 mm shaft then by applying a -1 mm shell the result would be a hollow cylinder with 100 mm bore and 102 mm outside diameter.

With an interference fit as you described that is in part an engineering question that I can't answer as I don't have enough information. For most moderate interference fits sticking with the same example above we would simply model the installed condition and tolerance the hole to +0.0/-0.25 or whatever applies. You'll notice that I used the term installed condition that is what we usually model to and use in assemblies. The other condition would be the as manufactured condition and on occasion you may need to separately model that. When you do organizations do all sorts of different things to support that data. Yours may already have a method you don't know about, but for flexible parts there is usually only one part number and in NX if the differences can be expressed with only a few parameter changes then you can support it using deformable parts. You'll find that under Tools>Define Deformable part, using F1 to access the help documentation to begin with.

Having said that about these as manufactured parts don't get confused with applying shrinkage for tooling etc that seldom appears on drawings and for the as tooled condition it is almost always handled separately by the tooling people in their own files.

Hope this gets you started

Cheers

Hudson