CAD/CAM Software strengthens business processes.
Press Release Summary:
CATIA v5.12 integrates functional modeling approach, which is based on semantic features that capture design intent. It provides coverage of functional, logical, and detailed design for composite parts. Publication mechanism within design-to-manufacturing and design-to-analysis processes strengthens management of engineering changes. For design and management of electrical equipment, CATIA provides full associativity between 3D design and harness documentation.
Original Press Release:
CATIA V5.12 Integrates Breakthrough Technology to Serve Product Innovation
At a glance
CATIA V5.12 introduces a new design paradigm and reinforces its leadership position in industry business processes. This release:
Introduces a breakthrough in product design with the integration of the revolutionary functional modeling approach and proves that "CAD is not a commodity."
Continues to strengthen and transform business processes for all industries by turning experience into advantage in such domains as electrical equipment, machinery, and composites.
Delivers two new products for the shipbuilding industry for compartment and access object definition and heavy structure detailed design.
Extends CATIA V5's portfolio of unique, entry-level PLM solutions with a new product for surface development, new capabilities in sheetmetal parts and mechanically welded products design, and significant performance gains for large assembly drawing generation.
Through the CATIA-ENOVIA engineering hub, strengthens concurrent engineering best practices and manages catalogs of features and equipment and system components.
Overview
CATIA V5.12 introduces a new design paradigm and reinforces its leadership position in industry business processes.
Through the integration of the revolutionary functional modeling approach, CATIA V5.12 delivers a breakthrough in product design. This approach further demonstrates that "CAD is not a commodity."
The functional modeling approach is embedded in the new CATIA - Functional Molded Parts 1 (FM1) product. FM1 is based on semantic features that capture design intent. It enables plastic part designers in the electronics and electrical (E&E) and consumer goods industries to concentrate on what they want to model and not how to model it.
This new paradigm provides significant productivity gains as well as all the benefits of being fully integrated in the CATIA V5 product design solution. The availability of FM1 just a year after the partnership announcement with functional modeling pioneer ImpactXoft Inc. is a clear example of the power and the flexibility of the V5 architecture.
V5.12 further strengthens and transforms the business processes of targeted industries by turning experience into advantage.
Complete coverage of functional, logical, and detailed design for composites parts, enabling customers to extend the use of composite materials within their products
Major enhancements for the design and the management of electrical equipment, such as full associativity between 3D design and harness documentation
Major productivity gains across the machining process, including a new 5-axis helix machining operation, which is a breakthrough for the design of rotating parts
In V5.12, the publication mechanism within the design-to-manufacturing and design-to-analysis processes strengthens management of engineering changes and contributes to better teamwork throughout the product and process definition processes.
The extension of automatic selective loading of relevant product data from ENOVIA reduces memory consumption up to 60%.
Key prerequisites
CATIA V5 runs on selected system levels of:
Microsoft(TM) Windows®
AIX®
Hewlett Packard HP-UX
SGI IRIX
Sun Solaris
Planned availability dates
September 19, 2003, CATIA V5.12
October 31, 2003, CATIA Web-based Learning Solutions (WLS) V5.12
Description
Knowledge
The new design paradigm in CATIA V5.12 reinforces its leadership position in industry-business processes. CATIA V5.12 delivers a breakthrough in product design by integrating the revolutionary functional modeling approach.
This approach demonstrates that "CAD is not a commodity." Functional modeling is embedded in the new CATIA - Functional Molded Parts 1 (FM1) product. Based on semantic features that capture design intent, this product enables plastic part designers in the electronics and electrical (E&E) and consumer goods industries to concentrate on what they want to model and not how to model it. This new paradigm provides significant productivity gains plus all the benefits of being fully integrated in the CATIA V5 product design solution.
The availability of Functional Molded Parts 1 just a year after the partnership announcement with functional modeling pioneer ImpactXoft Inc. is a clear example of the power and the flexibility of the V5 architecture.
The optimization tools are improved in V5.12. With this release, users can balance the constraints applied to a system, allowing better control of constraint resolution and the solving of over-constrained systems. The best solutions are then automatically classified, thus helping the end-user to decide which solution is the best compromise.
V5.12 also introduces new automation enhancements to perfect its morphing capabilities. These include the ability to:
Plug in a behavior at the end of an assembly template instanciation
Quickly access formulas in 3D
Instanciate a user-defined feature from a VisualBasic (VB) script
Integrate a loop in power copies
Process centric
V5.12 further strengthens and transforms the business processes of targeted industries by turning experience into advantage.
Delivers full-scale coverage of functional, logical, and detailed design for composites parts, enabling customers to extend the use of composites materials within their products. In particular, the manufacturability of composites parts designed through CATIA - Composites Design 3 (CPD) is enriched. More manufacturing constraints are taken into account earlier in the design stage to avoid such problems as wrinkling, fiber bridges, and shrinkage of material following the firing operation.
Provides major enhancements for the design and the management of electrical equipment. An example is the full associativity between 3D design and harness documentation, which provides users with a highly efficient 3D harness design solution.
Delivers major productivity gains across the machining process.
CATIA - Advanced Machining 2 (AMG) delivers an important breakthrough for the design of rotating parts. Its new 5-axis helix machining operation allows users to completely mill a blade by moving the cutter around it in a single path.
CATIA - Prismatic Machining 2 (PMG) delivers an opposite hand machining process for symmetrical machining. It supports all axial machining operations, pocketing, profile contouring, curve following, and groove milling operations, and allows the user to easily and quickly define the entire machining program of a symmetrical part relative to one already machined.
CATIA - 3-Axis Surface Machining 2 (SMG) introduces a new roughing operation adapted to hard material. It is especially useful for mold and die makers.
Consolidates shipbuilding industry coverage with the introduction of two new products. These new products are dedicated to compartment and access object definition and heavy structure detailed design. CATIA - Compartment and Access 2 (CNA) defines compartment and access objects within a ship design. Specifically, it provides users with the ability to define wall systems/nonstructural bulkheads, extensive compartment boundary definitions, placement of closures, stairs, and ladders, report generation, queries, and various analyses. CATIA - Structure Detailed Design 2 (SDD) completes the design of heavy structures with realistic plating and stiffening elements and provides industry-specific features to create detailed parts for hull structures.
Provides additional capabilities for the overall body process. These include highly productive new tools for designing advanced shapes within CATIA - Generative Shape Design 2 (GSD). These include curve offsets for generating joint planes for mold and die makers, removing twisted areas of swept curves for manufacturing draft surfaces, and multi-ribbon shape fillets. The production of best-quality Class A shapes is promoted within CATIA - Automotive Class A 3 (ACA) with both the automatic filleting of complex shapes and the creation of flanges at a given set of curves. In addition, CATIA - Freestyle Shaper 2 (FSS) delivers new, high-end associative analysis tools. The zebra shading feature allows users to check a model's quality in detail, and the highlight analysis feature allows users to display curve highlights at the end of the analysis process. CATIA - Freestyle Profiler 2 (FSP) now better respects guide curve segmentation and topology through a net quality enhancement.
In the body-in-white process, the modeling of fasteners within CATIA - Automotive Body-in-White Fastening 3 (ABF) is enriched by new types, including curve bead and spot projection welds, to increase product coverage. The reverse engineering process is also reinforced through new capabilities for repairing and decimating meshes within CATIA - Digitized Shape Editor 2 (DSE), new capabilities for creating curves (curve network management) and surfaces (surface filling on a curve network) within CATIA - Quick Surface Reconstruction 2 (QSR).
Product analysis and simulation is also greatly reinforced in this release. The accuracy of car body and product structure behavior simulation is increased through the support of new advanced meshing connections, including compatible spot connections with beam and hexahedron elements. In addition, V5.12 significantly reduces the time required for handling large model computation through both a new solving renumbering method and the extension of external solving to all kernel steps within CATIA - Elfini Structural Analysis 2 (EST). Finally, a 2D to 3D extrusion tool allows users to mesh solid parts with hexahedron elements through CATIA - FEM Solid 2 (FMD).
Small and medium-sized businesses benefit from the unique value of entry PLM solutions. V5.12 entry PLM enhancements include:
The intuitive and productive design of sheetmetal parts within CATIA - Sheetmetal Design 1 (SM1) is further extended as a result of additional mechanical features in the new sheetmetal environment.
In the mechanical design process, CATIA - Weld Design 1 (WD1) extends welding capabilities and standards consistency by adding seven double-weld types to cover specific welding processes, the ability to weld parts of different heights, and the creation of normalized welds (shape, name, parameters) according to ISO standards.
A new product, CATIA - Developed Shapes 1 (DL1), enables users to develop curves on a revolution surface and to unfold ruled surfaces. Once the surface is flat, it is easier to manage bulk calculations, such as raw material cost and manufacturability.
This release strengthens the CATIA V5 drafting solution across all industries with increased productivity and usability of its drafting tools. These include, in particular, the support of new dimensions (dimension along any reference direction, curvilinear total length dimension, technological dimension), the automatic recognition of intersection points for rapid dimensioning, and multi-tolerancing with associative numerical values automatically computed by CATIA V5. A new algorithm (approximate mode) for drawing generation in CGR mode is also added within CATIA - Generative Drafting 1 (GD1), allowing dramatic reduction in computation time for large assembly drawing extraction (up to 100 times faster).
In addition, CATIA-SMARTEAM collaboration is strengthened, thanks to the extended capability of applicative resources management within SMARTEAM. This contributes to a tighter integration with Plant Layout and Equipment and System applications.
Collaborative workspace
In V5.12, the ability to use the publication mechanism within the design-to-manufacturing and design-to-analysis processes strengthens management of engineering changes and contributes to better teamwork throughout product and process definition. V5.12 enhances the generation of high-quality, photo-realistic images. A new Fresnel shader can be applied for realistic glass rendering, enabling greater collaboration between design and marketing teams.
In this release, systems design and process development is simplified thanks to improvements in harness data management that enable users to store electrical connectivity XML files in ENOVIA LCA.
CATIA V5.12 continues to increase the ability to perform modifications on solids imported from external systems or in standard formats, thanks to new capabilities in feature recognition, such as draft and volume recognition.
Further steps in mechanical parts tolerant modeling are also delivered, such as automatically removing twisted areas during sweep operations and creating fillets along the geometry of sharp edges. CATIA V5.12 also delivers a completed migration report that reinforces V4-to-V5 transition usability.
For CATIA-SMARTEAM integration, V5.12 provides the CATIA user with the ability to automatically connect to SMARTEAM when launching CATIA. SMARTEAM object status is displayed through dedicated icons directly in the CATIA drawing feature tree.
Product Process Resource (PPR)
In V5.12, the CATIA-ENOVIA engineering hub strengthens concurrent engineering best practices, manages catalogs of features (user-defined features, powercopies, rule bases), and equipment and system components. The extension of automatic selective loading of relevant product data from ENOVIA reduces memory consumption up to 60%. When a milling machine is described within DELMIA, CATIA - Prismatic Machining 2 delivers a new capability that automatically generates the transition path between two machining operations. This new capability results in dramatic productivity improvement in prismatic machining programming tasks.
