CAMWorks Nesting - A nesting product on SolidWorks

Geometric is delighted to announce the release of CAMWorks Nesting®, a new product from Geometric that can automatically nest parts or assemblies in SolidWorks.

It is seamlessly integrated within SolidWorks® and creates the nested layout as a new SolidWorks Assembly. CAMWorks Nesting uses Geometric’s NestLib®, one of the fastest and most full featured automatic, true-shape, nesting libraries available.

This add-on module can be used to create efficient layouts of metal, wood or composite based materials, producing the maximum number of parts from a single piece of raw material within minutes.

• Full associativity with SolidWorks® - Updates are tracked, and flagged whenever a change is made to the component and are reflected instantly
• Increased productivity - No need to unfold parts or to convert 3D parts to 2D for nesting
• Automatic Nesting - Nests multiple parts, based on the material and thickness, thus eliminating the manual efforts of segregating individual parts
• Improved sheet utilization - Advanced nesting algorithms reduce raw material consumption by providing optimized and compact layouts

For more information, visit our website http://www.camworks.com/products/CAMWorksNesting.aspx

Cloud based Online Nesting

Nestlib is proud to unveil www.nestlibonline.com, an online nesting application. It is ideal for occasional users like small sheet metal manufacturers, carpenters/woodworking contractors, costing professionals, textile/leather product manufacturers, etc. If your nesting requirement is less than 10 nests per month, then you just spend $20/month ($240/yr) and get huge savings in material cost. NestlibOnline can generate PDF and DXF layouts. Evaluate for free.

Are you maximizing your nesting efforts?

Cost reduction seems to be today’s mantra in the manufacturing community. All aspects of a design that can result in cost are scrutinized, and measures are taken to prevent those unwanted and costly elements from making it into final designs.

Material and manufacturing costs are two major elements that influence total product cost. Through thoughtful design, both costs can be controlled or limited at the early design stage itself.

Read more at http://www.thefabricator.com/article/cadcamsoftware/are-you-maximizing-your-nesting-effortsr

Design parts as near rectangle as possible - An assembly example

An electrical cabinet design was originally designed with two parts as shown below.

The assembly contains a T-shaped non-rectangular part. To improve nesting quality, T-shaped part is redesigned into two near rectangular parts. This simple redesign improves material utilization and hence scrap area (Gray shaded) is less and remnant area is more (Pink shaded) as shown below.A saving of 4.583kg is observed for just two assemblies. For customizing nesting application in your CAD modeler, contact tech.sales@geometricglobal.com.

Design your components for maximum material utilization

Material cost governs a major share of product cost in sheet metal products and hence it is advisable to design parts/assemblies for maximum material utilization. All opportunities which can result in improved material utilization have to be analyzed. An interesting case is shown in Fig 1 which gave an utilization of only 39.58% with the original design.To improve the material utilization, the part was redesigned into two pieces as shown in Fig 2, which can be welded together to form the original design. This redesign improved the material utilization to 75.03%. Though material utilization couldn't be improved further due to design limitations, redesign helped to generate 273 pairs of redesigned model compared to 144 numbers of original models from the same sheet size. Welding is an additional process introduced by redesign but it was found that cost of material saving is greater than the additional welding and cutting costs.Visit Nestlib page for more details.

Redesign your components for cost reduction

A work table design modeled as shown below ended up with a nested layout involving lot of scrap.

Original design

Nested layout of the original design

By suitably redesigning the work table as shown below, part utilization increased from 4 part nesting to 6 part nesting in the same sheet and scrap is avoided.

Redesigned Part

Nested layout of the redesigned part

Click here for a Nestlib Evaluation copy

Methods and Issues in Determining Material Cost for Sheet Metal Parts

Cost of a sheet metal part comprises three major cost components such as material cost, processing cost and overheads. Determining accurate material cost has always been an issue. Theoretically material cost can be calculated as follows:

Material Cost = Area of the flat pattern*thickness*(weight per unit volume)*cost per unit weight.

But this is not a correct estimate as the flat pattern has to be cut from a standard sheet and scrap will be generated while cutting as well as due to the shape of the part. So, various methods are employed by costing professionals to estimate material cost that includes scrap cost. Considering thickness, weight per unit volume and cost per unit weight as constant, part area that accounts for scrap is calculated as follows:

1. Part Area = 1.2 times area of the flat pattern

2. Part Area = Area of the bounding box that encloses the flat pattern

3. The part under consideration is nested in a standard sheet and multiple quantities of same part are nesting. The quantity of the part is selected to fill the entire sheet.
Part Area = A*As/n*A,
Where A - Area of the flat pattern,
As - Area of sheet excluding remnants and
n is the quantity or number of parts nested in the standard sheet.

4. In few other cases, all the parts in an assembly having same sheet thickness are nested in standard sheet with a predetermined lot size.
Part Area = Ai*As/Σ(ni*Ai),
Where Ai - Area of the flat pattern of the ith part,
As - Area of sheet excluding remnants and
ni is the quantity of the ith part nested in the standard sheet.

Methods 3 and 4 are more accurate than methods 1 & 2. If the nesting software is more efficient enough as that of Nestlib, then the nesting software can automatically determine whether method 3 or 4 gives better utilization. Nestlib's optimizer module does this magic. Another important factor is sheet selection as utilization depends on the sheet size used. So, costing will further be more efficient if we can determine the optimal sheet size that gives maximum utilization. This task can also be performed automatically by inventory forecasting module of Nestlib. Even with all these above methods, we can only get a near accurate cost because the nested layouts at design stage involve only the particular part/assembly. Manufacturing might use a different nested layout involving other parts/assemblies. For a contract manufacturer, the nested layouts might even involve parts from different clients. But for costing, nested layouts at the design stage form a baseline for cost estimation and dictates a minimum utilization to be achieved during manufacturing.
i.e. if an utilization of 75% is achieved in design and an utilization of 85% is achieved in manufacturing, then it is acceptable. But if an utilization of 70% is achieved in manufacturing due to other assemblies, then manufacturing should use the nested layout given by design.