Simcenter Amesim Simcenter Amesim: Extract contour shape for 2D contact from a CAD file

Import of the shape through CAD Import

The steps below can be followed to create the shape contour file from CAD file:

1. Open the CAD Import tool (Tools > CAD Import) 
2. In the CAD Import main window, import the CAD files you want to work on (File > Import CAD file or File > Import > Part/Assembly...) 3. To be able to select the shape of your CAD file, activate the “Measure mode” (CAD Modeling > Measure mode) or click on the shortcut 
4. In the measurement window (by default in the bottom left windows), select the “Measurement” tab and click on “Create measurement”. 5. In the type of measurement, select “Contour" 6. Select the contour shape you want to measure. You can select multiple edge in one click with the continuous edge selection and with an appropriate tolerance value (<90 degree). You can also define the step size of your contour measurement. By default, the measurement will be in 3D dimension (xyz). To be used correctly in the 2D dimension, we recommend to select the correct projection plane for the measurement to have 2D values (xy, xz, or yz). If the orientation of the projection plane is different of the orthogonal plans and/or if you want to consider a different frame origin for the measurement, you might need to define a frame with the correct orientation, then define the part to measure as dependent of this frame (as shown below) and proceed in a measurement of relative contour position 8. Once the edges of the contour selected, click on “Measure”
9. The measurement will be available in the “Measurements” windows. It will store the position of each point of the contour by considering the step size. From there you can copy the values and paste them directly in a *.data file.

Use of the contour for PLMCONT000 submodel

1.Open the shape designer app of the PLMCONT000 submodel 2.Open the Contour Editor by clicking on the edition button on the contour you want to apply the change. 3. From there, you can either import directly the *.data file or copy-paste the value in the first two columns (X and Y). The third column is corresponding to the connection radius which is not measured in the CAD Import process and is fixed to 0 by default. The contour can be now used as it for the simulation. However, we recommend applying the tips below to reduce calculation time.

Clean up the contour for simulation speed up

To speed up simulation, the contour data can be optimized by reducing the number of points and defining radius value (R column) to keep the correct curvature of the shape. To do so, from the Contour Editor, go in "Operations > XY to XYR" or "Operations > Contour simplification". It will detect automatically lines and arc and apply a Radius value on an arc instead of points when possible. This can reduce drastically the number of points defining the contour if there are many arcs.
Additionally, the number of points can be reduced with a given tolerance from the menu “Operation > Clean up”.
With this definition, the calculation time can be noticeably reduced thanks to the reduction of number of points.