Advanced Sheet Metal Design Using NX Cad - Odd Shaped Enclosure
TITLE OF THE PROJECT: Advanced sheet metal design using Siemens NX cad - Odd shaped enclosure.
OBJECTIVE: To design an odd shaped enclosure and create a draft of it using Siemens NX Sheet metal application.
INTRODUCTION
Sheet metal is metal formed by an industrial process into thin, flat pieces. Sheet metal is one of the fundamental forms used in metal working, and it can be cut and bent into a variety of shapes. Countless everyday objects are fabricated from sheet metal. Thicknesses can vary significantly; extremely thin sheets are considered foil or leaf, and pieces thicker than 6 mm (0.25 in) are considered plate steel or "structural steel".
Sheet metal is available in flat pieces or coiled strips. The coils are formed by running a continuous sheet of metal through a roll sitter.
NX Sheet Metal: Creating fast, accurate flat patterns is the goal of any organization that manufactures products which contain sheet metal parts. NX Sheet Metal provides a set of tools within the NX design environment that allows for simple and fast design of sheet metal parts, dependent on their material and manufacturing process, the most common of which is straight brake sheet metal forming.
With NX Sheet Metal, formed and unformed representations of the parts are created closely following the industry workflows and best practices for bending calculations, tooling, and sheet metal features. The value lies in improving quality and reducing cost of sheet metal parts by producing an accurate sheet metal pattern as the correct input for part manufacture, whether internally or to a supplier.
DESIGN METHODOLOGY
Design methodology is explained by the flow chart as follows;
DESCRIPTION
Sketch:- It is the basic of any design.
Extrude:- It creates a feature by extruding a section along a vector.
Sheet Metal from solid:- It builds a sheet metal model that takes its shapes from a collection of planar faces.
Flange:- It is used to create an extended part (bend) of a sheet metal. It is created at the edge of one side of the model.
Jog:- It modifies the model by lifting material on one side of a sketch line, adding a flange between the two sides. Jog is created at another end of the model opposite to the flange.
Unbend:- This feature is used to unbend the adjacent bends and flatten them. Here it is used to create more features.
Rebend:- It is used to rebend the corners that were bent before along with any features added after the unbend feature.
Bead:- It lifts material along the contour of a sketch that simulates a stamping tool, it is used for giving strength to the sheet metal. Here two beads are created on the unbent surface.
Hole:- It adds a hole to one or more solid bodies in a part or an asembly with options for counterbored, countersunk and threaded. Here six simple holes are created on the unbent surface with a diameter of 10mm.
Flat pattern:- It creates a flat pattern feature from the formed sheet metal part.
IMAGES
Model feature tree
Following are the images of odd shaped enclosure in different views;
Front view
Back view
Top view
Bottom view
Right side view
Left side view
Isometric view
DRAFT (Drawing sheet)
CONCLUSION
By performing this task, I have learned how to design an odd shaped enclosure using features flange, bead, rebend, flat pattern, unbend, jog, extrude, hole and sheet metal from solid by creating an odd shaped enclosure.