Wiring harness design in CATIA V5 - 3D modeling Week 7 Challenge

WIRING HARNESS FLATTENING

Aim

The project aims to flatten the input file of the wiring harness geometrical bundle set by following the design guidelines and adding the flattened view to the drawing sheet by giving different dress-up features to the bundles and protective coverings.

Introduction

Wiring harness flattening

Electrical Harness Flattening operation is used for converting the 3D format of the wiring harness geometrical bundles into associated 2D drawings, which will be helpful in the various stages of manufacturing, assembling and installation.

Once a product is ready to manufacture, its design must be precise or it risks costly errors and delays. Collaboration is the essential key to successful documentation and design between harness designers and manufacturing. CATIA – Electrical Wire Harness Flattening provides automatic and complete flattening of 3D Electrical Harnesses for manufacturing documentation in a concurrent engineering environment.

Steps followed

Create a new product file for wiring harness flattening, initial settings and adding the relevant components

• Open a new product file for the wiring harness flattening process and switch to the electrical harness flattening workbench.
• Select the harness flattening parameters command a pop-up window appears to do the initial settings like, algorithm as coarse, angle mode as regular, minimum angle between two branches, flattening orientation, flattening scaling, synchronization, link and drawing options.
• Now open the input file of the wiring harness geometrical bundle product in a new window and check for the bundle continuity and all the components in the wiring harness assembly are electrically defined.
• Switch to the new product file for the wiring harness flattening and make the window as Tile vertically then we can import the input file to the new product file by selecting the geometrical bundle product tree structure using the extract command and the other window will be closed automatically.
• The imported file will automatically have the suffix .ehf file, this means it is successfully imported into the electrical harness flattening workbench.
• By selecting the appropriate plane and all bundles in the assembly we can flatten them by using flatten command and then adjust the position, angles, etc if required by using various commands available in the electrical harness flattening workbench then save all the files in one folder for the proper and smooth operations.

Create a drawing file and convert the electrical harness to a 2D drawing

• Open a new drawing file by using the file toolbar and thereby selecting new and type has drawing. Make initial settings like, standard, paper size, view type, etc available in the pop-up window.
• We can add the front view of the flattened wiring harness assembly to the drawing workbench by selecting the front view command and selecting the appropriate flatten surface from the electrical harness flattening workbench
• Right click on the border of the design sheet and go to the properties and view option then enable 3D wireframe and mark as is always visible from the dress-up feature.
• To enable the 3D views of the connector we have to switch into the electrical flattening workbench and by double clicking, the flattening parameters from the tree structure adjust the graphic replacement of the device to 3D projection and again add a new front view into the drawing.
• We can also add a frame and title block into the drawing by using the toolbar insert, drawing, frame and title block.

Applying the initial settings to the electrical harness flattening workbench

The initial settings are done on the electrical harness flattening workbench

Opened the input file of the wiring harness geometrical bundle product in a new window and checked for the bundle continuity and all the components in the wiring harness assembly are electrically defined

Make the window as Tile vertically then import the input file to the new product file by using the extract command

Imported the file successfully and shows .ehf file on the suffix of the file name

Flattened the electrical harness geometrical bundles by using flatten command

Adjust the position, angles, etc by using various commands available in the electrical harness flattening workbench and adding protective coverings to the bundles

Created a drawing file and added the front view of the flattened wiring harness assembly

Adjust the dress-up features to get a fully informative drawing associated with the 3D model

Final 2D drawing of the flattened electrical wiring harness assembly

Conclusion

Thus understand and applied the process of converting the input wiring harness geometrical assembly file into an electrical harness flatten bundle segments and thereby adding it into the drawing workbench to get a proper 2D drawing of the wiring harness flattening assembly.