Stretchy rubbery parts in inventor, should I model them? is there a better way?

[Hunteil]

I have a interesting component in to add to our standard components and I'm not sure if Inventor could even support it for our needs...

Anyways, I have this rubber O-ring like object that gets stretched between objects at different diameters for each side of the loop and would expand to different spacing between pins & rollers... I'm thinking of maybe making multiple .ipt's for my assembly. But I'm wondering if Inventor supports some form of elastic .ipt modeling so you can just take a single part file, constrain a face and allow it to stretch the part to anything you want... The benefit would be to allow us to have only 1 part file instead of dozens for the same part file.

Example images of some of the stuff to expect:

https://durabelt.com/images/animroller.gif

https://durabelt.com/images/mostresilientbelts.gif

any ideas?

[jtylerbc · Accepted solution]

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@Hunteil wrote:

But I'm wondering if Inventor supports some form of elastic .ipt modeling so you can just take a single part file, constrain a face and allow it to stretch the part to anything you want... The benefit would be to allow us to have only 1 part file instead of dozens for the same part file.

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Unfortunately, that's not possible.  You could potentially use Adaptive modeling techniques to generate the geometry based on other components in an assembly.  However, that is not the same as having the part be truly "stretchy".  Any given part file would still only be able to exist in one shape at a time -  you would just be able to make that one shape be smart relative to the surrounding geometry.

It's possible you could model all of the variations as separate solids in a multibody part, and control the visible one with View Representations.  This might let you do it all in one file, but may also be a bit cumbersome to manage.  So I'm not totally sure if it would be better than individual parts or not.

[blandb]

Are there a certain number of variations, or infinite? You could model the part as needed for the particular need or setting, and give it a new file name, but make the part number match the same as the others. That way you can have it counted for in the BOM, it would appear in sections and what not, but it is specific to that design. Make sense?

[Hunteil]

I would say infinite options. The more annoying part is the variety of diameters and angles it may take on. But this is good to know that there's not a built in thing for this. I'll include this in the Inventor Ideas and just make single parts for the time being.