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

                                 WIRING HARNESS FLATTENING

Aim:

              The aim of the project is to flatten the input file of the wiring harness geometrical bundle set by the following the design guidelines and add the flattened view to the drawing sheet by giving 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 designners 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.
• Then the flattening parameters should be edited on the electrical harness flattening workbench
• Now using extract option from the flattening workbench input the file of the wiring harness geometrical bundle product in a new window and check the bundle continuity and all the components in the wiring harness assembly are eletricall defined and input file is extracted to the flattening workbench.
• The imported file will automatically have the name of ehf file,this means it is successfully imported into the electrical harness flattening harness.
• By selecting the appropriate plane and all branches in the assembly we can flatten them by using flatten command and then adjust the position,angles and eytc.if requried 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 covert 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 and 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.
• 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 elctrical flattening workbench and by double clicking,th eflatteing 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.

Apply the initial settings to the electrical harness flattening workbench.

The initial 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 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 and 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 feature to get fully informative drawing associated with a 3D model and the 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 drawingf workbench to get a proper 2D drawing of the wiring harness flattening assembly.