Inventor does not have the ability to deform, stretch or alter sheetmetal thickness, even if that is exactly the process needed to create a real-world final product. Essentially Inventor sheetmetal only lets you create parts that could be made on a press-brake. It also requires/assumes uniform thickness. Things that are punched, stamped, formed, ironed or drawn are completely impossible to model as sheetmetal. Just take a hard look at your next soda can, and try to envision modeling it in Inventor’s sheetmetal tab. It can’t be modeled as it is in real life, only approximated. Yet the can, and the tab, are all made from sheetmetal in real life, so why can’t they be modeled as such? This is essentially the same for any sheetmetal product that is stamped, formed or drawn to shape. I would propose, as a first step towards filling this pothole, the ability to model tools (punches, dies…etc.) that can be applied to sheetmetal such that we can start to create formed products the same way we do in real life. Yes, I know Inventor has a punch command, but it does not do what we need. I would like to be able to model a tool and apply it to a sheetmetal plate just like a press does, have it cut/bend/form the material based on the geometry of the tool, then apply the next tool. Essential in this process is the understanding that the metal thickness WILL change, material will flow and stretch. Currently we can't model these products in the same way tooling shapes sheetmetal, therefore we can't make a properly realistic digital prototype. Without a proper digital prototype, all sort of downstream capabilities are shot as well. Example: I can't begin to run simulation on a soda can that doesn't correctly reflect the thickness of the material, or the progression of thick areas to thin ones. For many years I believed this pipe-dream was never going to happen because of the complex maths involved. However now that Nastran is a piece of Inventor, I actually think this door is opened. It would probably require the Nastran solver to correctly model the material based on the geometry of a tool applied to it. Essentially we would be using Nastran to complete the feature, promoting the deformed shape of the simulation back to the parametric model. If it is possible to use Nastran solver to handle this request, then other manufacturing process could also be simulated as features as well. Hydroforming?
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