OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu today announced that the latest version of FUJITSU Manufacturing Industry Solution iCAD SX, 3D CAD software for designing industrial machinery equipped with the world's fastest 3D CAD engine, will be available in Japan as of February 6.

Large-scale industrial equipment, such as industrial furnaces and heat treating furnaces, may be comprised of tens of thousands of individual components, with complex assemblies of machinery, steel parts, and conduits that all interrelate, making it necessary to simultaneously consider the design of each individual process. This new software package dramatically improves memory usage, greatly reducing the volume of 3D data and allowing files to be processed roughly ten times faster than before. In this way, iCAD SX makes possible parallel design of large-scale equipment comprised of thousands of steel parts and conduits, which previously could not be handled by a single software package due to the heavy volume of data.

Moreover, iCAD SX includes a feature that enables numerical information, such as the length and weight of the steel parts and conduits positioned in the machinery, to be automatically generated in a single batch of mechanical drawings or forms. It adds a drawing-generation feature that enables the high-speed production of assembly drawings, parts drawings, and cutaway diagrams from 3D models. These new features can reduce lead-times for the development of large-scale industrial machinery by about 40% compared to the previous version.

Ahead of the general release, the new product has been deployed and is in use by Chugai Ro Co., Ltd.

Background

Large-scale industrial machinery can be comprised of tens of thousands of machinery components, steel parts, and conduits that are configured in complex ways, and given the enormous volume of data this entails, performance constraints make it difficult for one CAD package to support all 3D data. For this reason, there has been a need to check for interference issues throughout the equipment using a viewer, and to use different specialized tools to perform respective design studies and to correct flaws. The problem has been that the need for designers to repeat work using different tools has extended the length of time required for the design process.

To resolve this problem, Fujitsu is now offering iCAD SX, which enables machinery, steel parts, and conduits to be designed in parallel on the same system, significantly improving processing performance for the massive volumes of data involved.

Product Features

1. Dramatically improves processing performance on large-scale data volumes to enable parallel design throughout the equipment

With iCAD SX, by sharing the memory space for solid data representing identical parts, memory demands are lightened by a factor of approximately 1.3, and file read speeds are enormously accelerated to roughly ten times faster. Because file lookup, saving, and editing performance have been dramatically improved, an entire large-scale industrial machinery system comprised of tens of thousands of parts can be designed in iCAD SX, and tasks such as interference verifications on the machinery, steel parts, and conduits can be quickly performed.

2. Batch output of steel parts and conduit design data greatly reduces ancillary design work

For the large number of steel parts and conduits, which can number in the thousands, using models created from 3D CAD conceptual design studies, iCAD SX can automatically generate mechanical drawings or forms, in a single batch, that include information on the length and weight of each steel part piece as well as each conduit connection. Information that previously could not be extracted from 3D models, including information needed for procurement, machining, and assembly, such as parts counts that had to be manually performed by checking assembly diagrams and parts diagrams, or such ancillary design work as inserting annotations, is now automatically extracted, making the process much more efficient by reducing the number of steps by some 50% compared to the previous version.

3. New feature for producing drawings greatly reduces workload

The new version dramatically improves processing speed for producing drawings from 3D models, meaning it can quickly produce assembly diagrams that can contain tens of thousands of parts. In addition, using intuitive operational steps, it can also easily produce many kinds of drawings, including assembly diagrams, parts diagrams, isometric views, cutaway views, and detail views, and when there are design changes, drawings can be updated accordingly as a batch. Taken altogether, these improvements reduce by some 80%(4) the number of steps involved in producing drawings and updating them for changes, so that design information can be sent from the design department to the manufacturing department quickly.

Pricing and Availability

Pricing and Availability
Product Name Retail Price (excl. tax) Shipment
FUJITSU Manufacturing Industry Solution iCAD SX V7L4 (CAD for Machinery Design/Steel part Design) Starting at JPY 1.38 million End of February, 2015
Conduit Design (optional) Starting at JPY 300,000

Sales Target

12,000 packages in fiscal 2015 (Fujitsu's fiscal year ends the last day of March).

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