Creating a solid structure from a negative volume advice

[0702518]

Hello,

Very very new to ProE and wondering if anyone can offer some advice / best practice on how to tackle my challenge.

I have a complex shape (combustion chamber, inlet/outlet valves etc) which is in negative volume form. i.e. There is no cylinder wall thickness or volume.

My question is, what is the best way to go about creating the solid engine block from this negative. Just advice and pointers is all I ask and I shall learn the hard way.. just want to make sure I go down the right track.

Thanks,
S

 

[dgallup]

You can create the cylinder head, piston, etc. with extra material and then in assembly mode do a component operation / cut out to remove this negative volume from the other parts.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

 

[jvian]

You may run into problems with part accuracy using the cut out option if you have some very small surfaces on a large part. We run into this problem somewhat regularly and usually adjusting the part accuracies fixes things just fine. If not then you may also be able to use surface copies and solidifies to generate the 'positive' you describe; however, this tends to be a little more tedious and depending on the complexity you may lose associativity. This is a method we use to create core and mold geometry for casting processing.

Hope that helps and be prepared for a potentially steep 'learning curve' with ProE/Creo. It was tough for me getting through the wildfire releases after switching from SolidWorks but there is quite a bit of information on these forums so good luck.

- J -