Calculate the Development Length of a pipe or tube

[admin]

We work majorly with tubes/pipes. For manufacturing, we need to find out the developed lengths of pipes.

Is there any way we can get the same directly?

I am attaching a sample file for reference to give an idea.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

Tejas.

[innovatenate]

This is a tough one. There's not really a straight-forward way I could find to measure the length of all of the sketch curves at one time. You can measure the sketch section by section. It would be really neat if you could somehow derive this value from a pipe command. However, I wasn't able to find a way to do so. It think this would make an awesome suggestion in the Fusion 360 Ideastation. 

I could get a guess if calculating backwards using mass. I had to crank up my precision to get a good measure of the mass of such tiny section. These settings are in the Unit and Value Display panel of the Preferences.

If I take a .01 mm length of the pipe section and then get the mass from the Properties dialog of the body, I can see that the mass is .0093911g. Note that you would need to be careful that the materials match since density is determined by the materials applied to the body.

The mass of the full pipe length is: 2491.828 g

Calculating backwards, I would estimate the pipe is about 2491.828 g / .0093911 g = 265339.310624 lengths of .01 mm pipe section.

Then a quick conversion to mm (1 mm / 100 lengths) *265339.310624 lengths = 2653.39 mm is the estimated length of the pipe.

Other than that, the only way I know how to do this is to use hand calculations. I can measure each section of the curve using the inspect tool, add the numbers to spreadsheet and sum it up. Just to check my results above, I added up the sections and the results are below:

Straight lenghts	Arcs lengths
475.89	31.66
147.95	15.71
62.92	89.01
182.10	66.43
255.02	31.66
475.89	15.71
147.95	89.01
62.92	66.43
182.10
255.02
Subtotal	Subtotal
2247.77	405.63
Net Length	2653.393217

So with some quick math you can get to the some results. There may be some better ways to do this out there. 

I hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions. 

Thanks,

[admin]

Adding the length of the components from the sketch is something that I was aware of. But that was a cumbersome way. I would have be happy even if there was an option to convert the parts of the sketch into a Polyline (as in Autocad) for which we could get the total length of that polyline.

However, even that is missing.

I realized that there is also a "pipe" command. The developed length can be a good addition in the attribute list to the Pipe command. Once you select the body created using the 'Pipe' command, we can get the developed length.

Hope that gets added soon.

Regards,

Tejas.