Defining Starting Geometry

The next thing we’ll do is import our CAD data. The easiest way to do this, I think, is simply just drag and drop. For this first section, just watch, and then we’ll follow along in a bit. I’m going to drag and drop the assembly of this Creo part onto the screen. The part’s going to get, the assembly is going to get imported, and I’ll be able to manipulate the geometry from here.

As with always, we can double click, right click, extract the CAD body, turn it into an implicit, access the different bodies under the properties panel, and pull out various entities and work from them. At the moment, I don’t suggest bringing in assembly files and working with them. I’d encourage you to bring in individual part bodies. The reason being is I like to often reference CAD entities during my design process to make the workflow as parametric as possible. So for instance, if I want to capture this CAD edge and this CAD phase, I drag them into this CB. I’ll get an axis created through here. Now, if I go through, if I go back to my CAD data, update a fillet, or add a hole, then this CB and this axes that I’m referencing for, let’s say a downstream operation, may get updated.

The reason being is currently we visit each part in an assembly, we’ll collect the items, the faces, the edges, the vertices, etcetera, and generate one list. So if that part changes or a part changes, that list can get updated. During this quarter, our product team is working on capturing the assembly list, and in the following quarter, they’re going to work on a persistent referencing initiative to aid in working with assembly files.

I’m going to delete the blocks that I see on screen now. Instead of bringing in the assembly, I’m going to control select each of the parts on the screen and simply just drag and drop them. I’m going to go through each of them. I’m going to isolate each one and rename it to its appropriate section. You can find it in the file path, you can look at the name, or simply just follow along.

Once I have each of these labeled, I’ll minimize each of the imported parts, and I’m going to rename this section to imported CAD. Then I’m going to create two new sections below that. The first section I’m going to call CAD plus solid bodies, and then CAD plus fluid bodies. I’m going to come under each of the block details for these imported parts, open up the properties list, and drag each of these bodies into their respective sections. So this top dome is a solid body. I’ll drag it into here and continue through this process, opening the list and taking out the individual solid body. Minimize the imported CAD data section and then rename each of these CAD body variables. So this will become top dome and so on and so forth.

Next step will be turning each of these into an implicit. Moving from the top down, click on top dome, hit I to isolate, double click and convert CAD Body To Implicit Body, and as I go through this, I’m going to control C, control V the names and rename the implicits implicit variables that get generated. So now anytime we want to bring in an updated version of any of these imported parts, it’s going to automatically update the top CAD and implicit bodies and so on and so forth.

Next thing we’re going to do is create a new section, and I’m going to call this CAD and implicit references. The first thing I’m going to do is turn on each of my plenum regions and capture the inlet and outlet faces. So we’ll start with the oil inlet at the top. I’ll right click, say create CAD Face Variable, and I’ll drag this down into the CAD and implicit references section and rename this oil CAD phase. Do it for the oil outlet, the fuel inlet, and the fuel outlet. We won’t use these right away, but we’ll reference them later on as well as add to this section. Go ahead and close the sections here. We’ll minimize these and create a new section, and we’ll go ahead and call this one hex core and fluid generation.