We worked with: Custom hollow metal door manufacturer, US
The company needed: To automate sheet metal nesting for custom door designs directly from the custom models.
challenges
Longer engineering lead times due to manual nesting for each custom design and higher material scrap due to changing part orientation in final assembly.
Approach
Hitech’s design automation engineers developed online door configurator using DriveWorks for the hollow metal door manufacturer for generating custom 3D models which were then leveraged to automate nesting.
Our DriveWorks experts along with client collaborated with SigmaNEST to develop customized codes for both, DriveWorks and SigmaNEST to automate nesting using logical rules and excel functions.
We assigned special purpose coordinate systems according to the coordinate system in SigmaNEST for all the part models generated by DriveWorks and set all component orientation identical to the ones in DXF using Flatten configuration.
It allowed SigmaNEST, in auto mode, to import geometrical CAD data from SQL exported by DriveWorks, to read part orientation, and to scale them during nesting.
Results
Optimum sheet metal utilization
Zero errors despite part rotation
Saved time during metal nesting