Posts Tagged ‘Tips and Tricks’
NX CAE Tips & Tricks – Usability Features
Thursday, July 26th, 2012
Usability is a major focus for NX CAE. In our effort to put you, the analyst, in the driver’s seat, we are constantly enriching our front-end with intuitive, productivity enhancing features. Allow me to introduce you to just a few of them.
Optimize robotic palletizing using Tecnomatix
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012
The use of robots for packaging automation is one of the fastest growing applications of robotics. Especially in the consumer products and shipping industries, Robots are increasingly used for packing cases, bags and containers commonly referred to as Robotic Palletizers. For lifting heavy payloads and processing the operations at high-speed, Robots have improved safety and productivity of palletizing applications by many folds.
Watch this video that shows how you can use Tecnomatix to plan and optimize your robotic palletizing processes.
NX Hints and Tips – Rapid Sketches WITH Keyboard Shortcuts
Friday, June 22nd, 2012
Last week, I highlighted a video showing how to rapidly create sketches. This time, we’ll use a number of NX shortcuts.
As you can see, by adding the shortcuts you can be much more productive.
Some of the shortcuts mentioned in the video are:
- To create a new part file, press Ctrl N.
- To hide the WCS, press the W key.
- To switch to the isometric view, press the End key.
- To switch to the nearest orthographic view, press F8.
- To create a sketch and start the Profile command, press Z.
- To start the Constraints command, press C.
- To start the Dimensions command, press D.
- To start the Arc command, press A.
- To exit the sketch, press Ctrl Q.
- To display the Insert menu, press Alt S.
- To display the Design Feature menu, press E.
- And to start the Revolve command, press R.
- To create a sketch and start the Profile command, press Z.
That wraps up my NX8.0 video series. For more information on other help topics, please check the NX Technical Documentation. It’s a great resource for NX users.
Remember, all the NX8 Hints and Tips video’s can be found here.
Coming up next, we’ll take a preview look at NX8.5. Stay tuned.
Jerry
Jack Human Simulation: anthropomorphic databases and task analysis tools
Friday, June 22nd, 2012
One of the biggest strengths of our Jack human simulation tools is the range of human performance analysis tools we provide in the software. Whether it is to analyze forces on lower back or load carrying capacity of wrists, Jack can help manufacturers to ensure that their manual assembly operations are safe and efficient. In addition, we offer a comprehensive set of anthropometric databases to ensure that you can include your full range of the worker population for analysis.
Watch this video that shows how a sequence of assembly operations introduces different set of ergonomic issues for different workers and what steps can be taken to improve the assembly steps. (more…)
Robotic gun search with Process Simulate
Monday, June 18th, 2012
We all marvel when we look at industrial robots working in perfect harmony, and doing some of the most complex manufacturing operations. However, before it gets to that stage lot of upfront planning is required to make sure that the robots can perform the sequence of operations accurately.
One of such robotic planning activity is to select the appropriate gun that is capable of reaching a set of weld locations, some of which might be in tight spaces and difficult angles.
Watch this video that shows (more…)
Striving for a balanced production line
Thursday, June 7th, 2012
I always relished my short and uneventful drive from my home in Canton to my office in Livonia Michigan. A short ten-mile drive along the I-275 freeway and voila I’m at work. With the gas prices skyrocketing (at least until recently), I couldn’t ask for a better office location but then this spring, they decided to work on one of the bridges and close two of the available three lanes. Now my short drive turned into a construction nightmare. I’m often late for my early morning meeting, tired of giving the same excuse to my colleagues about Michigan constructions. After hours, I’m late for my kids’ activities, and it isn’t funny to them when I give the same construction excuse.
I have to endure all these suffering because when they turned the three-lane highway into one-lane they created a huge bottleneck. A smooth and predictable flow of traffic has been disrupted by restricting the amount of resources (lanes) available.
For industrial and manufacturing engineers, such optimization issues are presented to them every day at the assembly lines. However, I’m sure they will say that comparing production flow issues in assembly lines to traffic flow is an over simplification of what they have to deal with in managing their assembly lines. Assembly lines that are designed to build complex products such as cars, earth movers, planes and so on.
In an assembly line, engineers have to manage multiple product variants where the rate of flow between stations can vary significantly and on top of that they have to take into consideration availability of resources between shifts. Manufacturing engineers have to work through these variables and still ensure that assembly lines are designed to achieve a leveled production flow. This is necessary to make sure that manufacturers can meet their customer demands while utilizing the available resources in the most efficient way.
This task of achieving a smooth production flow in an assembly line is called the “line balancing” and it has been an optimization issue for engineers ever since modern assembly lines were invented. The idea is when you achieve a leveled production flow your assembly stations and resources are efficiently utilized, and you prevent building of bottlenecks.
With Teamcenter 9, you can now perform line balancing and ensure that you can meet your Takt time goals for your new products or mid-cycle changes to your existing products at the early stages of manufacturing planning.
Check this short video that illustrates how easily and intuitively you can balance your assembly lines in Teamcenter.
Finding ways to talk about digital manufacturing
Tuesday, June 5th, 2012
Hello Friends 
My name is Abhijit Dastidar, and it is my pleasure to join the Siemens PLM Software blog team. Thanks to Susan for introducing me with her post. I’m a marketing manager of Tecnomatix and spend my days figuring out ways to talk about our digital manufacturing technologies.
As I was spending one of these days thinking about ways to talk about our digital manufacturing tools, I met Todd Bengtsson, director of the manufacturing business group. Todd said to me, “You know, my team and I create tons of technical demo videos. I just wish somebody can make these videos available for public to watch.” I told him, “Well, that is why we are here. Can you please show me these videos?” So he took me to his room and started showing me all the demo materials that he has with him. If you ever walk into Todd’s room, you will know that this is a place where computer hardware are taken apart and then put back together again in the right way. Todd’s room is the mother of all geek rooms I have ever seen. There were five computers of all shapes and sizes, seven monitors, HMI, PLC and few other hardware tools that I couldn’t figure out what they were. Todd asked me to pull a chair as he browsed from one computer to another showing all the videos that he has created. As I looked at those videos, I couldn’t stop drooling and then I started thinking, “Really! Such a huge treasure-trove was here right under my nose, and I missed it.”
This experience with Todd forced me to think about the possibility of communicating our digital manufacturing technologies through videos. (more…)
Saving Layouts and Views – Femap Tips & Tricks
Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012
Femap allows a lot of control of the appearance of the user interface, and lets you specify the desired layout of windows, panes as well as the view attributes. Once you have everything set the way you like it, you can save both the layout and the view so that you can easily recover them when desired.
Femap Layouts and Views
Alastair
Follow Femap on facebook and the Femap group on LInkedin
Femap “How To” Video Series: Creating Constraint Equations
Friday, May 18th, 2012
This is the first in a new series of “How To” videos that demonstrate some of the more advanced FEA modeling functionality accessible through Femap.
In this video we’ll see how to use Femap to set up a constraint equation that relates nodal degrees of freedom of a finite element model. Constraint equations can be used to create rigid connections between nodes, or calculate some useful quantity that is a function of nodal displacements.
How to set up constraint equations
Alastair
Follow Femap on facebook and the Femap group on LInkedin
Femap Tips and Tricks: Using Reference Groups
Wednesday, April 18th, 2012
The Groups capability can be used in Femap to help organize various entities in a model and aid visualization. However Femap also offers the Reference Groups capability which extends this, allowing you to manipulate existing groups without changing their underlying definition, and essentially define groups of groups.
Femap Reference Groups
Alastair
Follow Femap on facebook and the Femap group on LInkedin
