Computer aided design softwares like Autocad and unigraphics have literally replaced the drawing boards and tracing sheets. Today’s modern computer aided design softwares can produce complex die designs with much ease and accuracy. Computer Aided Designing (CAD) is one of the fastest growing field in metal stamping industry. Autocad, solidworks, mechanical desktop (MDT), unigraphics, ProE, IDEAS, CATIA etc are some of the most commonly used die design softwares.
Advantages of Computer Aided Design
Computer Aided Design has lots of advantage over conventional drafting using drawing boards and drafters. Using computer aided design complex designs can be created with ease. Visualization of complicated surfaces and assembly can be done with the help of these CAD softwares. Editing and modifications in the existing design is much easier. In conventional designing this is a tedious task. The analysis CAD softwares can give you good idea on the sheet metal behavior on various forming and sheet metal working operations.
These design softwares are also used in plastic mould design, jigs and fixture design and die casting die design. Computer Aided Design saves time and the space to maintain the paper drawings. Designs stored in computers can be retrieved much faster for editing and plotting. Individual part drawings can be directly exported into machining programs like mastercam. Computer aided design softwares like unigraphics and po engineer also have an inbuilt machining version. Let’s examine some of the popular computer aided design softwares in detail.
CAD Software
Following are some of the popular CAD software applications.
Autocad
Autocad is one of the most popular computer aided design software used in both die design and in mechanical engineering. Compared to other CAD softwares, autocad is an excellent software especially in 2D drafting and editing. Autocad is a highly user friendly software which makes it very popular among die designers. It is easy to learn autocad compared to the other complicated computer aided design programs. Autocad is developed by Autodesk, a market leader in mechanical design softwares. The developers of Autocad, AuroDesk is conducting various Autocad training programs around the world.
Unigraphics -UG
This is another popular in mold making industry. In addition to that UG can also be used for computer aided machining operations.
Pro E
ProE or pro engineer from parametric technology is also gaining popularity in computer aided design for its capacity to design complicated 3d assembly.
Solidworks
Solid works is perhaps the simplest 3d modeling software, yet powerful with its extensive features. You can produce complex 3D models using your existing 2D cad datas. It is really easy to to make design changes in Solidworks. After a change is made in solidworks model, the associated parts, assemblies, molds, and drawings automatically update.