Creo Elements/Direct Sheetmetal

Streamlines Sheetmetal Design and Manufacturing

Creo Elements/Direct Sheetmetal helps engineers in the high-tech electronics and machinery industry create complex parts quickly and easily by taking the guesswork out of sheetmetal design. Completed designs incorporate manufacturing process information, ensuring design for manufacturability (DFM), while shortening lead times with reduced scrap and material costs.

Benefits

• Combine the speed of a direct modeling with powerful sheetmetal design features, enabling rapid iterations of product designs in build-to-order products

• Compensate for material deformations in the manufacturing process and optimize for customer specific shop database

• Optimize product design by using industry-standard sheetmetal tooling within the manufacturing process and eliminate unnecessary customized tooling costs

• Bring your suppliers’ custom sheetmetal manufacturing capabilities into your 3D CAD software, and expand your design options to include the custom tooling available within your supply chain

• Use 3D models and associated manufacturing data stored in sheetmetal features to streamline the transition to production

• Calculate manufacturing costs in just minutes to provide bids for sheetmetal projects or to support cost/benefit analysis for sheet metal capital equipment purchases

Capabilities

• Design ready-to-manufacture sheetmetal parts in 3D

• Optimized commands to create and modify sheetmetal designs

• Design punches, stamps, bends, lips, hems, and offsets

• Orthogonal side face cutting to correct sheetmetal side faces manipulated in 3D modeling

• Automatic creation of reliefs and corner reliefs based on material and tool

• Intelligent creation of a sheetmetal part from a solid model

• Support of imported geometry

• Detection and assignment of sheet thickness

• Assignment of bending information

• Receive proactive design advice if DSM (design for manufacturing) is violated while modifying the part

• Automatic selection of preferred tools

• Propose resolutions for detected design flaws based on minimum distance from tool to existing bend, feature, or edge

• Conformance of bend angles and radii to material and tool limits

• System provides meaningful parameters including size and type if corner reliefs have to be created

• Automatic model adaptation in response to changing material or manufacturing tooling/processes

• Analysis for manufacturability with given shop data (tooling and processes)

• Model adaptation to material thickness changes

• Automatic detection and adjustment of bending information, including bending reliefs

• Detailed analysis report about conflicts and possible needed changes

• Context-sensitive mini-toolbars provide direct access to sheet metal commands for fast methods to create or modify parts

• Animated 3D folding and unfolding

• Automatic and manual selection of bends

• Automatic generation of accurate and complete 2D flat drawing

• Automatically recalculate dimensions such as length to reflect the material bend allowance values

• Tool identification codes for all punch and stamp operations, including position, direction, and angle

• Bend identification with tool and process information

• Bend and corner relief suppression/replacement

• Fully associative to 3D

• Cost estimation based on:

• Material and amount

• Number of operations and tools used

• Perimeter length and enclosing box size

• Surface finishes

• Fixing, such as rivets

• Lot size

• Set up, run, and handling time

• Customize the technology database with your:

• Sheetmetal design expert knowledge

• Preferred materials

• Available tools

• Costing information