Fabricated Piece in Autodesk Inventor

The image above is a welded piece of a mechanical component designed in Autodesk inventor. The design took off by initializing the 2 dimension sketch. The model was then generated from the 2D sketch drawn in the “.ipt” environment. This was then converted to “weldment”. You may not be able to follow all these jargons, if you don’t have any background in fabrication or interest in welding technology which is another chapter on its own. Anyways, the point here is that, Autodesk inventor has the capacity for piece to be welded with another piece, as it would be in real world. You can make several parts of a mechanical system and later assemble it using various in-built environments abound in the inventor package. You can as well use the other methods of joining piece, like bolting, riveting and so on in Autodesk inventor.

The “weldment” environment possesses the ability for metal pieces to be welded together to  form a large fabricated system. This singular function allows for the flexibility in designing and assembling a system with greater freedom and changeability. The welding process replicates those found in various standards. On completion of the welding process, one would then be able to analyze the system by applying load and other real life working conditions and constraints, which the design will be subjected to.  Autodesk inventor has the capacity of putting the welding properties on the model and thereby making the design replicate the real life strength.

The type of loads and constraints will then be applied on the welded components with ease; this again will give room for validating the components based on whether the system is either over design or under design and optimization be the next action.

The finite element analysis on this piece was done by applying 5KN on the welded plate and watching the deformation in real time.

Well, feel free to contact me on this or any other topics treated on this blog.