RE: Pro/E and Windows NT

From: KDenton@williams-int.com
Date: Tue Dec 14 1999 - 20:28:37 EET


Hello All,

Now that the initial rush of responses are back here is my problem....

99.98% of our parts are for investment casting and most of these parts
contain small features. For example some of the blades that we produce have
a .005" to .010" radius on the trailing edge. When we generate our .stl
files in Pro/Engineer we usually try to write them with a cord height
setting of .0001" and an angle control of 1. These settings generally give
us a file that represents the part the best. In UNIX Pro/E we had very
little trouble doing this. In NT Pro/E we seem to have hit a limit in that
there is 1.6 gig high limit on actual and virtual ram that can be used.
This results in files that at best been written out at a .010" to .001" cord
height. Any thing beyond the .001" and sometimes its hard to get to there,
is worthless for casting.

We generally like to see about 1 million triangles to represent these types
of parts. Anything less has not been acceptable. Before everybody sends me
email on triangle reduction these parts are so sensitive to that, that just
a .0001" difference in cord height will change the shape of the blade to a
point where it becomes unusable. The theory about the laser not being able
to reproduce these tight features does not work here as well as we have been
doing this for the past 4 years (I can't go into detail about part placement
and build parameters), we do see even the slightest change in the QuickCast
pattern when we fuss with these settings. Our .stl files are generally
between 30 and 40 meg in size.

Karl Denton
Lead Engineer
Williams International

        -----Original Message-----
        From: KDenton@williams-int.com [SMTP:KDenton@williams-int.com]
        Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 1999 11:27 AM
        To: rp-ml@bart.lpt.fi
        Subject: Pro/E and Windows NT

        Hello All,

        Have any of you had trouble writing .stl files out using the NT
version of
        Pro/E?

        Karl Denton

        For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/



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