Extruding (removing material)-Assemblies

[PDassos]

Hi all,


I'm a student studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of New South Wales in Australia and use Pro E for all my modelling needs.


I had a quick question relating to extruding (removing material) from assemblies with multiple parts. I am trying to measure a piece of an assembly and assumed the easiest way would be by extruding and removing material from 90% of the assembly and then using Analysis-Model-Mass Properties to find the area of the remaining assembly components.


I did, however find that you cannot extrude and remove material from assemblies for some reason. If anyone could shed light on this issue it would be greatly appreciated.


Regards,


Peter

 

[hkhalaf]

Hi Peter,


I don't really know how your case really looks like, but I recommend that you create or edit each part alone doing its analysis alone.


Afterwards, you may be able to do model mass properties for the whole assembly.


I hope this helps,


Regards,

 

[PDassos]

Hazem, thanks for you reply.
My assembly is quite complex with a number of parts whose placements are largely interconnected. It would be near impossible to cut the pieces individually and then reassemble.

Do you know of any other method of measuring mass properties (in particular volume) in specific sections of an assembly?

I have been using pro e for some time now and was quite surprised that you cant remove material from an assembly.

Thanks
Peter

 

[kdem]

Without seeing exactly what you are doing I'm not sure I could guess either but you should be able to remove material at the assembly level.

 

[rohitms]

hi peter,


i completely agree with khalaf,


wht u r trying to do is a simple assembly cut, which is always possible. and one of the basic functionalities of pro/e


which version of pro/e r u using?


if u could upload a copy of the assembly then v could try n identify the prob

 

[neuronex]

This might work: Create a new part in the assembly.
Activate the new part. Insert > Shared Data > Merge, and do
that for all the parts you want analysed. You now have one
part containing (a merge of) all the others you require.

The new part can be opened, you can remove material, then
do an analyses on the remaining materials.

 

[sanjeevkar1]

Peter i think you are doing wrong somewhere.


you said "you cant remove material from an assembly."


but you can use extrude comand to remove material from the assembly (actually you can ONLY remove material with extrude comand in assembly).

 

[audctrl]

Sometimes assembly cuts will fail if edge of the cut intersects a tangent line from some feature in some model. Most of the time adjusting a dimension in the sketch by just a little bit does the trick.

 

[PDassos]

Thanks for all of your help!


All of your ideas assisted, but I found the easiest way was to export the entire assemly as a x_t (flat) file with no shell and to then re-import it asa single part. Removing material using an extrusion was then simple!


Cheers!

 

[Mindripper]

Be careful about trying to cut to a tangent (or with a tangent sketch entity) in any part or assembly in any CAD package. This is pretty much the definition of a degenerate or unstablefeature: creating a function that uses an area which disappears to a line or a point -> an area that converges to zero. Kick the corner out on a perpendicular line or something like that, or add a fillet later.