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Robust Tolerance Analysis

Robust Tolerance Analysis

Long time Inventor user, reccently started messing around with Fusion to try and get ahead of the "curve", assuming that its the future of CAD design.

 

One thing that frustrates me with Autodesk products, and I say this without hyperbole, is that they are hands-down the worst CAD platforms when it comes to any sort of robust tolerance analysis, either natively or through 3rd party add-ins, amongst the major CAD platforms. With the other platforms I can get:

 

NX - Technomatix/VSA (Seimens), 3DCS (3rd party from Dimensional Control Systems)

Catia - Cetol 6-sigma (3rd party from Sigmetrix), 3DCS

Solidworks - Cetol, 3DCS

Creo - Cetol, 3DCS

 

which can stochastically analyze designs in 3 dimensions. Some of these, such as VSA and 3DCS, and also even link with FEA data to provide even more robust design outputs, allowing one to analyze designs as functions of both tolerance and physical effects such as deformation ,thermal expansion, etc.

 

I think its great that Autodesk has an eye on modeling machining processes, performing FEA, and improving visual qualtiy of 3D models, but lets not put the cart before the horse - without tolerance analysis, none of these things really matter because you can't verify that you can actually build them in the real world. Even if you could build them, how do you intelligently design for cost optimization without tolerance analysis? You can't.

 

So frustrated by this lack of capability, I contacted 3DCS about making us ("Us" being a major player in the healthcare industry and a fortune 500 company) an add-in for Inventor of thier analysis software (they currently make it for everyone BUT Inventor), and they were open to the idea, but in the end we couldn't purchase enough seats to make it fiscally viable for them (we currently use their stand-alone, CAD neutral platform). My point is, there are companies willing to take on this challenge, they just need to know its worth their time and development costs.

 

So I implore the good folks at Autodesk - stop worrying about making things look pretty on a screen. Start worrying about making things work in the real world, and incorporate, or partner up with someone to provide, 3D tolerance analysis capabilities in your software.

 

 

2 Comments
swerst
Participant

Hi Avery.

 

My name is Stephen Werst, and I'm the Senior Product Strategist at Sigmetrix. We actually have a brand new 1D tolerance analysis product, EZtol, targeted to be available at the end of this month that will read Inventor files directly without conversion. Some information about it's capabilities has already been posted to www.eztol.com. I'd be happy to show you more about this product as well as discuss other plans that may be of interest to you as an Inventor user. Please feel free to email me at swerst@sigmetrix.com if you'd like to learn more.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

jrinad70
Enthusiast

I second and third this feature request!

 

I just watched your training video on Contact Sets and it got me thinking.  Fusion knows the size of every component and feature via their dimensions, it knows if something comes in contact or not via contact sets and Joint limits, so why should one not be able to conduct a tolerance stack up?  Seems like one should be able to create a dimension/measurement between two objects or edges, and perform a worst case stack-up.  On top of that, it seems that if Fusion allowed one to assign a Cpk value to each dimension Fusion would be able to perform a statistical tolerance analysis.

 

Of course Fusion would have to have the ability to apply GD&T to features in the model to do it right, which currently Fusion does not, but this could be added too.

 

As a design engineer who performs statistical stack-ups now (via Enventive), this ability built within Fusion would be killer and a huge competitive advantage over any competitor!  I understand I made that sound much easier than it really would be, but it seems like Fusion already contains much of what would be required to pull that ability off.

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