Rolling a sheet into a tightly wound cylinder

[pegasixi]

Hi all,

I've been trying to figure this out for so long but I'm at a loss... It doesn't help that I'm not too familiar with CATIA either. My problem is the following: I need to start off with a rectangular piece (basically a piece of paper) and then roll it up starting from the end. Essentially, imagine rolling a sheet of paper into a cylinder. Is there any way to achieve this in CATIA? My goal is to figure out how the length of the sheet and the thickness of the sheet contribute to final thickness of the rolled cylinder. Also, locating where certain features on the sheet of paper end up when rolled into a cylinder would be very useful.

Thank you in advance!

 

[ferdo]

Hi,

In your case I would play a little bit with Sheet Metal Design Workbench or Generative Shape Design (depending on what licenses you have).

This will allow you to create a rectangle part with some features on it (I mean some cuts) and see what is happening when you are bending that part, giving some parameters like thickness, of course.

Of course this can be achieved also with Part Design, just a little more work to implement few parameters easy to modify....

Regards
Fernando

https://picasaweb.google.com/102257836106335725208

 

[jackk]

Interesting little problem.

I'd start with a sketch of the end of the coil and use a spiral curve. I think that should provide most of the answers you're looking for.

To "roll up" certain features, I'd use the Developed Shapes license to fold the flat pattern onto the surface extruded from the spiral.

How tight is the roll? What is the starting radius?

 

[pegasixi]

@ ferdo. I have access to any license I want, but unfortunately, I'm not too familiar with the Sheet Metal or Generative Shape Design... Are there any particular functions that you would recommend?

@ jackk. I tried something similar in Pro/E and it worked okay-ish. The problem is that it is actually not just a single sheet of paper, but a sandwich of 3~4 sheets. Some of the sheets have non-uniform thickness as well, so I have no idea how to go about doing this.

The roll has to be as tight as possible (i.e. no gaps between rolls). An Archimedes spiral may have done the trick if it were only a single sheet of paper, but since it has multiple sheets with non-uniform thickness, I can't tackle it from that approach. The starting radius is 3mm.