How do the experts optimize material use when laying out a sheet metal assembly.
Lets use a truncated cone for example. The client has given you a list of the available sheet sizes (lets say 4'x8' and 5'x10') and you need to make up a large cone, the number of horizontal courses are arbitrary.
How do you determine the best use of the materials at hand?
Are you looking for something like Inventor Nesting? Or are you talking about something different?
Mark Lancaster
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Autodesk Inventor Certified Professional & not an Autodesk Employee
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It's like nesting, but in reverse!
Assuming I maintain horizontal welding seams...
I can start with a sheet size that's available, but I need to manually determine how big of a cone section I can cut out of that sheet. And since the cone geometry is static, the cone sections can vary in a lot of ways to make the shape.
I can make the sections taller and have fewer horizontal seams at the expense of having more vertical seams. I can maybe use smaller sheet sizes and get a better material use efficiency, but at the cost of more weld seams.
I can give all these variables costs, but I still need to consider and iterate the different ways to build the cone manually.
See this comment for a visualization.
Fabrication question: is the fabrication done by welding in the flat, then bending the entire sheet, or by bending sheets, then welding them together? I expect the latter (forming equipment has some size limitations), but it makes a difference how to approach optimization.
Update: I see from your latest post that you've asked this before and not got a definitive answer. I don't have anything to offer beyond what you've shown in your previous topic.
Sam B
Inventor Pro 2020.1.1 | Windows 7 SP1
LinkedIn
I've worked on both. Welding first in the case of hopper bottoms for grain bins.
But most of the projects it's all formed first due to the thickness involved.
That can add another headache for conical sections. Most of the modern cylindrical rolling machines can get away with little to no 'grip' (the flat bit that is trimmed after the forming) but conical sections it's usually required, and need to be considered.
See this comment.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/sheet-metal-rolling-grip-flat-allowance/td-p/8685849
@Cadmanto wrote:If I am reading you correctly, you are talking about the flat pattern laying them out on the sheet sized you specified and utilizing as much of the material as possible with minimal scrap?
Yeah, pretty much. Unless the material is cheaper than another weld seam, but for now let's just use the material usage as the metric.
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I think this original post was asking if Inventor had a tool to optimize fabrication of large parts. IE parts bigger than the standard sheet size. Think tanks in a tank farm, or grain bins.
If your question is the other way: the parts smaller than the standard sheet size then use Inventor Nesting, part of the Product Development and Manufacturing Collection.
Steve Walton
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