Forming Technologies (FTI), part of Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division, announced today the worldwide release of the CATSTAMP CAA V5-Based and CATSTAMP for CATIA V6 (3DExperience). As a CATIA V5 and V6 Partner product, CATSTAMP provides forming simulation, blank prediction, and cost optimization tools for sheet metal stampings. It is used by cost estimators, design engineers, tooling designers, and advanced planning engineers in the automotive, aerospace, consumer product and electronics industries. This release introduces numerous enhancements that ensure the best quality results and exceptional performance for all users.
Overall changes to the CATSTAMP’s Forming Toolbar and process flow allow for optimal Material Utilization (MUL) and Design for Manufacturability (DFM) concepts to fully be realized. These concepts help customers reduce material waste through virtual tryouts replacing test stampings and addressing formability issues that could threaten the integrity of a part long before the stamping makes it to the shop floor.
FTI’s CATSTAMP products are fully integrated into both CATIA V5 and V6 as Forming Toolbar icons for formability, blank development, and springback analysis. The Forming Toolbar’s new single dialog is intuitive for quick adoption, enables two-times faster performance, and is more efficient for users significantly reducing mouse mileage. Further, the new integrated data management architecture no longer requires CATIA’s analysis workbench making data management seamless and all FTI CATSTAMP results are stored natively in the CATPart file.
CATSTAMP now boasts substantial improvements in post-processing capabilities allowing the user to identify information anywhere on the component. User’s will enjoy the dynamic heads-up display of simulation results for all result plots. The new integrated reports allow users to highlight and identify important information including automatic indication of minimum/maximum and multi-pick options. The additional display and reporting of “true part weight” accounting for node by node thinning and component strains can significantly improve accuracy of CAE analysis such as crash simulations, structural, dynamics, NVH, durability and fatigue by accounting for the manufacturing process of the body-in-white components.
Finally, significant updates have been made to both speed and accuracy in CATSTAMP Springback Analysis. Tooling design and development for sheet metal forming is an expensive process in terms of both time and current manufacturing cost. CATSTAMP can be used in tooling design procedures to accurately predict and accommodate for errors due to springback in sheet metal forming operations. To design the appropriate tooling, springback distributions on the sheet in the fully loaded, deformed state are computed by CATSTAMP and, using a new direct link, loaded into CATIA’s Digital Shape Editor for users to morph native CATIA (part or die) surfaces for springback compensation. Using this Springback-Morphing process natively integrated in CATIA provides users with a powerful tool that can replace their current trial and error procedures, thereby greatly reducing the cost of tooling development and the experience required for such development.
About Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence Division
Hexagon is a global sensor, software and autonomous solutions provider. Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence division provides solutions that utilize data from design and engineering, production and metrology to make manufacturing smarter.
Hexagon has approximately 20,000 employees in 50 countries and net sales of approximately 3.8bn EUR. Learn more at hexagon.com.
About Forming Technologies
Forming Technologies is the developer of CAE software for design and simulation of sheet metal components. Since 1989, FTI has provided OEMs and suppliers in the automotive, aerospace and appliance industries with innovative software and training solutions designed to reduce development time and material costs. FTI has trained over 12,000 engineers in formability and die design and is considered best in class around the world for its industry training programs.
For information visit the company’s website at www.forming.com.