Determining Contact Area and Boundary

[JamieVJohnson2]

I have as assembly with 2 plate parts, they are constrained to each other face to face (mate).  What would be the best way using Inventor API (vb.net for me) to get the contact area and boundary (for individual lines) of this connection?

[xiaodong_liang]

Hi,

TransientBRep.ImprintBodies finds regions of faces on two bodies which overlap and creates new bodies where the faces are split at the edges of the overlaps. I wrote a blog for this question. Hope it helps:

http://adndevblog.typepad.com/manufacturing/2016/07/overlapped-areas-of-mated-bodies-in-assembly.htm...

[Jef_E]

Hi @xiaodong_liang,

I find this a very interesting blog post, only problem I have is that my objects aren't constrained like that. Is there a way to check if 2 occurrences have an overlapping area instead of looking for a mate constraint and then do the same as written in the blogpost?

[xiaodong_liang]

Hi,

the workflow of that blog is a demo for the original question. Actually the body1 and body2 of TransientBRep.ImprintBodies can be only bodies. So you can input the bodies of occurrences. If hey have overlapped area, it will return those overlapped information, otherwise, it should return none.

Or, you could firstly use AssemblyComponentDefinition.AnalyzeInterference to check if the two occurrences are clashed and use the way of TransientBRep.ImprintBodies