Weight of Multiconductor Electrical Cables

[marky4556]

Hi. I am using NX 8.0.3 MP8 Routing Electrical.

Has anyone other there used the Routing Electrical module with nested multicores and been able to calculate weight successfully? I am testing how this works with a PTB in advance of using the PLMXML import and I cannot get it working with a PTB. It works fine for wires, just not for nested cables. I am following the following steps:

1. In PTB, setup a cable part with a WEIGHT of 0.31336 and a WEIGHT_UNITS characteristic of LB-FOOT.
2. Create a top level cable with two conductors as children. Setup to/from pin connections on the children. There is no to/from setup at the top level cable assembly.
3. Apply stock at the cable part level.
4. Go to Information -> Routing -> Routing Objects. Click the stock and hit OK.
5. The stock weight is reported as 0.

NX is reporting the cable stock weight as zero because the WEIGHT characteristic is applied at the cable top level structure per the PTB, but the top structure is not technically 'routed' (it has the green checkmark but not the white box with arrows). NX does however carry the length from the lower level segments to the top level cable.

The only workaround is to set the TO and FROM connector at the top level cable assembly and not set a pin and do a mixed or component level route. However, this is not really a logical approach and also forces the user to route to the component level since a cable cannot be assigned a pin at the top of the nested cable. Also, most schematic tools do not report a to/from at the cable level - only at the wire level so this presents a problem for PLMXML import.

 

[nelani]

Hi marky4556,
I'm also trying to do the same thing and it works fine. I'm getting the weight for the cable but it adds up the weights of all the wires inside the cable. So, if i assign a weight of 1 kg/m for my cable in ptb file, and the cable is having 3 wires (cores) inside, the weight is calculated as 3 kg.If i set the cable weight in ptb as weight/No. of wires in the cable, the problem would be sorted. Actually, NX calculates mass for the bundle(sweep body), be it a wire or a cable.

 

[marky4556]

Hi Nelani,

Thanks for the response. You are correct, it adds up the children if stock is assigned at the child level. The problem is that my P/N is assigned at the top level (for the entire cable). If I were to assign it at the child level, there is no where to account for the weight of the cable shield and jacket. That is unless I assigned a stock to the shield. I am manually assigning solid densities for now. It takes longer but works.

Marky