Center of gravity or mass

[rafardid]

I am learning to use Autocad 2014 and I would like to know if is possible to calculate the Center of Gravity of a piece formed by several pieces of diferent materials (so different densities or specific weight).

Thank you

[JDMather]

You can do this in Autodesk Inventor.

Students can download Inventor for free from http://www.autodesk.com/edcommunity

[M_Hensley]

AutoCAD can do this. If your objects are regions or solids you can use UNION and/or SUBTRACT to create one object then MASSPROP will give you the properties you need.

[JDMather]

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@M_Hensley wrote:

AutoCAD can do this. If your objects are regions or solids you can use UNION and/or SUBTRACT to create one object then MASSPROP will give you the properties you need.

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Can you post an example?  How do you assign material properties to solids in AutoCAD?

[M_Hensley]

Here is an example of an assembly of extruded aluminum and plastic. There are 4 shapes unioned together and the massprop for the shape. The properties are not material specific so you do need to know the number for your material to multiply the area by to get mass. (For aluminum it is 1.176)

[dgorsman]

Its been a while since Statics and Dynamics class.  Given a uniform density of a part, then would changing it from one material to another (ie. only the mass would change) change any of the physical properties aside from mass?

The original post indicated multiple objects of different densities so you may be correct - without individual materials to assign to different solids there would be additional math involved using AutoCAD.

[JDMather]

It might be a while till I can  get back to this.

(and it would help if the OP would provide more information - as least a screen capture)

But a simple uniform extrusion (of all parts) can quickly get complicated if the geometry isn't a simple single crossection.

So while the class problem using hand calcs was .....

[rafardid]

Thank you but I think this is not suitable, because I am talking about several types of material in a unit, for example aluminum and steel, then you cannot joint all the pieces and create one with homogeneous material properties.

[JDMather]

You can assign material properties in Autodesk Inventor product.

Students can download Autodesk Inventor for free from http://www.autodesk.com/edcommunity