Maplesoft™ announced the release of the MapleSim CAD Toolbox, a new add-on to MapleSim that allows engineers to understand and improve their mechanical designs by bringing their CAD assemblies into MapleSim, the advanced system-level modeling and simulation platform. The new toolbox makes it easy to import CAD models into MapleSim, so engineers can learn how their designs will behave as part of a larger, multidomain system, and apply the advanced analysis tools of MapleSim to investigate and optimize their designs and final application.
The MapleSim CAD Toolbox imports CAD models directly into MapleSim, recreating the model components and preserving their kinetic and kinematic properties as well as the spatial relationships between components. It offers feature detection, allowing users to easily add new coordinates at points of interest, such as the center of a hole or along the edge of a component, and it makes it easy to share coordinate frames between separate bodies, ensuring the bodies will be properly aligned when joined.
The MapleSim CAD toolbox handles files from virtually any CAD system, through direct support for a large number of proprietary formats, including those from Inventor®, NX®, and SOLIDWORKS®, as well as the widely supported STEP and STL files formats. Once in MapleSim, the models can be shared with other MapleSim users, or online using the MapleSim Server, without requiring that the end user have access to the original CAD system or CAD files.
"Today's complex engineering designs involve components from many different domains, and these are often designed using different tools, often resulting in problems at system integration time. With MapleSim and the MapleSim CAD Toolbox, engineers now have the means to examine how their mechanical designs work as part of the complete system, in advance," says Paul Goossens, Vice President Engineering Solutions at Maplesoft. "They can detect and correct problems at the virtual prototyping stage, long before expensive prototypes are built. Even better, with the deeper understanding of the interactions of their overall system, they can make performance-enhancing, cost-saving optimizations, resulting in better products for them and their customers."
