About | ECITTT | Conference Programme | Abstracts (16.)

THE CADFIX INTEROPERABILITY SOLUTION

Andrew Chinn
FEGS Limited
Oakington House
Oakington
Cambridge CB4 5AF
UK
In today’s computer dominated manufacturing industry, collaborative engineering processes and technologies require practical and efficient CAD/CAM/CAE interoperability. However, the exchange of engineering data between OEMs and suppliers still exists as a major issue that can add weeks of effort and considerable cost to the manufacturing process.
This presentation discusses the issues, the problems they can cause, the reasons, and the impact they can have on the manufacturing cycle. Solutions to the problem are also discussed in terms of advances in systems, the employment of new methods and processes, and software tools available.

One of the most effective software solutions available for tackling data exchange and re-use problems is CADfix. CADfix has evolved over 20 years to become the industry leading CAD data exchange tool, with engineers and designers across the world harnessing its power to achieve effective exchange and sharing of CAD/CAM/CAE model data amongst upstream and downstream users.
CADfix supports the import and export of data from a variety of systems and formats including IGES, STEP, Parasolid, ACIS SAT, STL, VDA, CATIA and CADDS. CAD files from multiple sources can be read into CADfix, and then automatically repaired and flavoured as required before being exported to your target application.
CADfix’s automatic processing capabilities are supported by powerful interactive tools that ensure CADfix can tackle almost any model topology or geometry problem. The powerful combination of CADfix’s automatic and interactive tools and services aim to always provide the user with a solution to their data exchange and reuse problems.

Typical benefits realised by current CADfix customers include being able to use a model in a meshing application after a few minutes or hours work that had previously taken weeks or months to mesh, or just simply being able to work with otherwise useless data.
An overview of the range of capabilities available to the CADfix user and a demonstration of the software will be provided as part of the presentation.

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