Wiring harness design in CATIA V5 - 3D modeling Week 5 & 6 Challenge

Title: Wiring harness design in CATIA V5

Objective: To route the given harness layout in Electrical Assembly Workbench and after completion of routing, we:

1. Check the bundle Continuity.
2. Add annotation to all connectors.
3. Check for the bundle warning if any.
4. Generate CAT. Part of harness assembly and convert it in .igs format.

Design Methodology:

Routing the harness assembly:

1. First open the 3D CAD data of all the connectors in Catia and then convert the file formats (ex: .igs,.stp) to .CAT Part.
2. Define the connectors both geometrically and electrically with the help of the appropriate workbenches.
3. Create two different assemblies called as Wire Harness A and Wire Harness B in the Electrical Harness Assembly Workbench and route the connectors according to the given layouts for both the assemblies.
4. Now create a third assembly called wire Harness Assembly AB and then link Wire Harness A and Wire Harness B together electrically in the Electrical Assembly Design Workbench.
5. Save the file.

                                    Fig1: Wire Harness A

                       Fig2: Wire Harness B

                    Fig3: Wire Harness AB

Checking the bundle Continuity:

1. In Harness Assembly AB window go to Edit and then click on the Search option (or press ctrl + F) to open the search menu.

2. In the menu select the Advanced tab and then select Electrical as Workbench, Bundle Segment as Type and fully connected as Attribute, a pop-up dialog box will appear, click on false to check whether there is any discontinuity in the assembly and the click on the search icon from the menu.
3. A display will appear showing 0 object found which will ensure that our assembly is full connected and there is no discontinuity in any of the bundle segments.

    Fig4: Search Dialog Box

Adding annotations to all connectors:

1. Go to Assembly Design Workbench and select the Front View/Annotations Plane Option from the toolbars and then select the any front plane of the connectors where we want to add the annotation.
2. After that select the Flag Note with Leader option and the annotation will be added. Double Click on the annotation to give it a desired name.
3. Repeat the same process for all the other connectors.

Checking for bundle warnings:

1. No bundle warnings occurred.

Generating CAT. Part of harness assembly and convert is in .igs format:

1. Lastly, we convert our CAT. Product file to CAT. Part file by selecting Tools > Generate CATPart from Product option and then our file gets converted and saved.
2. We then use the Save As option to convert our file in .igs format.

       Fig5: Converted CAT Part from CAT Product