Flexible Parts / Spinal Bend

[mwetter]

I have posted a couple of times and have recieved some great responses
on this subject - yet I still have not been able to achieve what I am
after. I am hoping that if I keep posting on here somebodies
light bulb will light up and be able to offer up the advice that will
get me where I am going! Anyhow....



Think of the old fashioned bellows used to get the coals burning a
bright red - a convoluted bag between two plates that flexes accordian
style as the bellows are squezzed together and pulled back apart.
We design after market air suspensions and we have not been able to
accomplish what I stated above - our air springs as we call them are
between two solid surface that are not parallel and we need the air
spring to be able to work accordian style as the suspension is lowered
or raised. Our PTC reps are willing to give this a go for us, but
at a premium price and I cannot get our boss to agree to spending the
money for this - so in the meantime if we need a picture to send a
customer we copy a ProE drawing over to AutoCad so that we can manually
manipulate the air spring to look correct at a certain height - it
stinks becasue we know ProE is capable of what we need, we just don't
know how to do it! We have tried flexible parts and spinal bends
to no avail. We already use mechanism and are able to move our
suspension up and down, just not the bellowed rubber air spring.



Help!

 

[takedownca]

Flexible parts should be able to do what you're looking for if the parts are setup correctly. For example, in order to accommodate bending in one plane, you could create a trajectory curve that starts at one plane and ends at another. The base plane can stay stationary, but the end plane can be controlled by a distance and an angle. Those two dimensions should be registered as flexible. I don't see why that wouldn't work. It's no different than a spring. Try patterning a single bellows convolution (revolve) along a sketched curve.

 

[mwetter]

Thanks for the reply takedownca - I have only worked in ProE for a
little over a year now and have not gotten into anything this
complicated - is there any way you could creata a simple assembly with
what you are explaining above and email it to me? This way I
would be able to dissect what you did to created and see if I could
re-create it?

 

[giridhar_tech]

Dear mr


mwetter,


Iam not exactly able understand the design intent.


it will be very help full if u can post a picture of it.

 

[takedownca]

Give me your email and I'll send you an example file.