Autodesk to incorporate MechSoft technology

An Autodesk product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Mar 8, 2004

Autodesk is announcing an agreement to acquire certain assets of MechSoft, an Autodesk Inventor Certified Applications Programme partner and developer of the award-winning MechSoft product.

Autodesk is announcing an agreement to acquire certain assets of MechSoft, an Autodesk Inventor Certified Applications Programme partner and developer of the award-winning MechSoft product.

This move advances Autodesk's goal of delivering engineering capabilities to the design department to help customers build products based on the concept of "functional design".

Functional design is a new, more direct way to design in 3D.

Autodesk plans to integrate key components of MechSoft's technology into future versions of Autodesk Inventor Series.

"By incorporating this proven technology into our design tools, we are able to further extend the value of our solutions and help our customers improve their mechanical design process," said Robert Kross, vice president of the manufacturing solutions division at Autodesk.

Functional design moves beyond 2D drafting and 3D modelling, enabling users to work in terms of mechanical relationships, rather than geometric descriptions and constraints.

For example, the engineer designs a gear set based on loading and reduction ratios rather than size and placement and then lets MechSoft generate the geometry as needed.

This engineering functionality means that users can shorten design cycles and optimise as they design.

The MechSoft asset acquisition, which is expected to close in March 2004, is a major step in Autodesk's efforts to build engineering functionality into its market-leading 2D and 3D mechanical design software.

Although Autodesk did not disclose the terms of the acquisition, MechSoft's technology will significantly complement Autodesk's solutions with many tools that enable users to embed engineering calculations into their designs based on how parts function.

Specifically, these tools include: * More than 50 calculators and design wizards (eg bolted joint, shaft generation, gear, cam and spring wizards) that provide critical engineering information during the product development process, resulting in huge savings in manual calculations and lookups for each and every component * A drag-and-drop content library consisting of more than 1.5million parts representing all prominent international standards * A built-in mechanical engineering handbook that provides instant access to reference materials that design engineers use daily.

Autodesk gives the following example of how Autodesk Inventor and MechSoft can be used.

Charles Bliss is a lead engineer on a project charged with modelling the historic XH44 (eXperimental Hiller 1944) helicopter on loan to the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, California.

The XH44 was the pioneering helicopter for Hiller Aviation and the company wanted a permanent replica at the Hiller Aviation Museum; however, the plans no longer existed.

With only archived photos and limited access to the historical helicopter, the project was extremely challenging.

By combining Autodesk Inventor series software with MechSoft technology, the Bliss team was able to model the airframe.

Generating models of the mechanical components, which were inside inaccessible housings, posed a bigger challenge.

To overcome this hurdle, they entered known data into MechSoft wizards, which in turn automatically created the gears, bearings and shafts.

Because it allowed them to change the design variables and quickly see the corresponding changes to the components, the team could very rapidly determine which gears could handle the load and would fit the casings.

"With MechSoft and Inventor, it couldn't be simpler.

"Knowing the loads and speeds, MechSoft can find the parts that work.

"It frees me up to think about my designs and worry less about whether a component is going to fail," said Bliss.

"Instead of poring through catalogues and doing calculations, I just tell MechSoft what I need the parts to do and it finds them for me, presenting me with all the choices that fall within the range I specify.

"It puts all the handbooks I need inside Inventor, which removes the guesswork".

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