CAD in Context, How Physical Parts Factor-In to Your Digital PLM World

Do you have physical parts laying around with no CAD? Have you invested substantial amounts of money in PLM or PDM systems, only to have a large portion of your products sitting squarely outside this system? As 3D Imaging has progressed, we see it converging with the regular digital domain of design. Via Imaging, you can take that “legacy” part, and get a 3D representation of it. How you use that data has been the question for over 10 years.

First, let’s talk about why your CAD or PLM system doesn’t understand 3D scan data. Now we see an apples-to-oranges problem: how do you take apples and make them into oranges? This presentation looks at the different generations of software trying to solve this dilemma. Closing with the latest generation, we see a way to take 3D Scan data, and make it work with our system, instead of outside of it. We look at a case study of a game controller, and how we can create everything from drawings to assemblies to tooling, just like a “real” part. The only difference being it wasn’t created in our PLM originally.

Monday May 17th, 8:30am-12:00PM

See how Reverse Engineering can be used, and get up to speed on the latest technology in the industry!

Since 1981 Rosenberg Ventilatoren GmbH (http://www.rosenberg-gmbh.com), located in Künzelsau-Gaisbach, has developed into an outstanding centre of the air movement and air handling industry by design and production of controllable external rotor motors. Rosenberg is a competitive medium sized company with around 1,400 employees worldwide and during the last 20 years, the Rosenberg Group has been complemented in Europe by several additional works in France, Italy, Hungary, Czech Republic and Germany.

With an annual production of about 120,000 fans, Rosenberg Ventilatoren GmbH currently exports 55% of the total company turnover and to keep the high quality of products, they aim to chase a continuous flow of information and good cooperation with their valued customers all the time. Furthermore, it is important to jointly achieve a continuous evolution of the quality of products.

The case study goes on to describe how they scan existing fan blades to generate CAD models.  And of course with XOR, the CAD models are editable because they have a full feature tree, with parent-child relationships (not just a bunch of imported surfaces):

As new project, they were looking for a solution provider who is able to measure a ventilator blade for qualified CAD modeling. The new project aims to create a precise CAD modeling for Highly-Effective Performance with lower noise and vibrations. It is always challenge for them to improve their products in terms of efficiency and noise and now they are quite keen to see new improvement with Rapidform XOR, the most comprehensive Scan-To-CAD application.

sigma3D (www.sigma3d.de), plays a role to serve the qualified CAD modeling using Rapidform XOR to Rosenberg Ventilatoren GmbH and Mr. Hubert Schwarz, Project Manager at Rosenberg is quite satisfied with the performance of Rapidform XOR. sigma3D uses a FARO laser scanarm for measuring, then imports it into Rapidform XOR to create a optimized polygon model in easy & quick way through “Mesh Buildup Wizard™”. This technology automatically processes the 3D scan data from multi-shot point clouds into a single qualified mesh. After that, to capture each geometry information interactively, Rapidform XOR is able to produce “Auto Segmentation” from the mesh model automatically based on feature region.

Of course, the real magic results come from what you do after you’ve gotten to a merged mesh.  The XOR technique of making CAD models for scan data is all about extracting design intent, then using real CAD tools (like extrude, revolve, loft, sweep, fillet, boolean and such) to build up a real CAD model that represents the scanned object.  This results in an “intelligent model”, meaning it’s feature-based and editable just like anything that can be designed in SolidWorks, Pro/E, NX, etc.  In the case of Rosenberg Ventilatoren’s fan blades, this means that they can improve upon an existing design and bring a new product to market in record time.

You can imagine the condition of an old field-worn military vehicle, hardly the best source for a pristine CAD model from scan data, or is it?

This isn’t any military vehicle, this is the original prototype Jeep – from Bantam — predating that Willys, Ford, or Kaiser your granddad drove in the big one. The Bantam Jeep is being restored by a group of amateur military historians, and 3rd generation reverse engineering with Rapidform XOR is making it all possible.

Michael Raphael is an advisor to the SME 3D Scanning conference, and owns Direct Dimensions; one of the premier scanning service bureaus. As such, he has the luxury of selecting from all the major point-processing software packages. Direct Dimensions knew that the 2nd generation process of Scans to Polygon Mesh to NURBS surfaces would take a lot of time and would propagate all the imperfections brought on by some failed parachute drops (where the chute didn’t open) and years of wear and tear. But Direct Dimensions also knows about Rapidform XOR.

XOR enables Direct Dimensions to generate perfected parametric CAD models from imperfect scan data of a bent, field-worn vehicle. XOR’s unique 3rd generation process eliminates the Polygon mesh and the NURBS steps, enabling Direct Dimensions to model parametric CAD models directly from the point data.

This saves time but also gives the operator the means to “model out” the dents, bends and other imperfections, and create an “idealized” model. With accurate CAD models, the customer is able to reproduce the “design intent” with a fully native CAD model in Solidworks, complete with the history tree.

See images of the process from Direct Dimensions here.