Why isn't part density tied to material properties? and other points.. 1

[potrero]

NX5...

Even though NX has access to a nice Material Properties library for use with CAE (ie: Tools -> Material Properties), these properties (ie: density) are NOT propogated to the part upon selection when using Advanced Weight Management.

To get part mass (weight) using Analysis -> Advanced Mass Properties -> Advanced Weight Management, one must first enter the correct density under Edit -> Feature -> Solid Density.

In addition to being a clunky and a bit hard to find, what's even worse is that the density entry is not parametric, so it doesn't seem possible to create a user-defined density variable that can then be linked to a material properties file.

Overall it looks like there are at least three separate areas where one may apply material properties to a part in NX:
(1) Edit -> Feature -> Solid Density (for assembly weight management)
(2) Tools -> Material Properties (for CAE)
(3) System Materials Pallette (for visualization)

Are the reasons for keeping these methods separate still valid?

Or would it make sense to have a Unified Material Properties Editor, which would control Assembly weight, CAE, and Visualization. There could be a range of sub-options for each genre of application (ie for Visualization, there could be lots of freedom in picking color etc, or even a sub-database of visualization colors/textures/etc for any given material).

To the user, I think such an approach would be more efficient and sensible to manage than the current way of doing things.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Why are you using Analysis -> Advanced Mass Properties -> Advanced Weight Management to get mass properties? Those are legacy functions (despite the totally outdated designation as being an 'Advanced' function) which are no longer the recommended analysis tools, at least not if you're working with solids. In that case, you should be using Analysis -> Measure Bodies... which does take into account the density assigned using the Material Properties Library function. The Expression measurements also key off of the density assigned by the Material Properties Library function.

As for keeping the different schemes (there's actually a fourth one, for Sheet Metal design) for assigning materials separate, there is NO valid reason to do so, just that the priority to consolidate these separately developed approaches has at least until now not been high enough to get it included on a project list for a future release. Now there is some preliminary studies being done as to what SHOULD we do across the various applications which utilize material assignments, be they analytical, visual, drafting (BOM designations) and even manufacturing, but there is still no fully-funded project to make the changes needed to have a single all-encompassing material assignment scheme which would support all of these applications areas, but at least we're looking at it and scoping the size of the effort.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
NX Design
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

 

[potrero]

John,
Thanks for pointing out the Analysis->Measure Bodies and Expression measurements approaches.

A unified material properties approach still makes sense; it would just clean up the program interface a bit.