Solid Edge 9.(Software Review)(Evaluation)

New design environment and add-ons highlight latest UGS release

UGS's Solid Edge Version 9 is the latest release of the company's powerful midrange mechanical modeling software. The new version builds on the program's capabilities with a new weldment design environment, simplified parts and assemblies, dynamic collision detection, and several optional add-on modules.

As in previous releases, Version 9 is divided into separate environments for creating parts, working with sheet metal, constructing assemblies, and producing drawings. This release adds a new environment--weldment--with its own file type that simplifies the creation of welded components. The specific workflow-oriented tools in the weldment environment support the creation of weldments from a collection of parts. After creating a weldment document, you can add surface preparation features, weld bead features, and post-weld machining operations.

Within the part and sheet-metal environments, a new function lets you create a simplified version of a part containing fewer faces and features. After you've created the simplified view, you can display the part as it was designed, or in its simplified view. In large assemblies, simplified views can greatly improve performance.

A new assembly environment tool lets users monitor dynamic collision detection. The Simply Motion kinematics analysis package, introduced in the previous version, has extended its interference detection capabilities to find the point of initial contact in a range of motion, and to find the minimum distance between two parts.

The previous version introduced software sensors, virtual gauges that allow you to monitor minimum distances or track variables such as driving and driven dimensions. Version 9 adds two powerful new sensors: a surface area sensor to monitor the surface area of a part as you model it (or negative surface areas, such as cutouts) and custom sensors that you can create to monitor values of numerical results calculated by custom programs.

The most impressive additions to Solid Edge are the optional packages; notably, the Solid Edge Engineering Handbook, a $1495 add-on developed by MechSoft.com and integrated with Solid Edge. The Handbook includes a collection of calculations (standard mathematical formulas and physical theories), a calculation-driven parts generator, and the online Engineering Handbook itself, which documents the formulas, algorithms, and theory that ...