NX Tooling Design helps you achieve greater productivity and accuracy for molded part and sheet metal tooling, with new design automation and validation capabilities.

Mold Design

NX 8 reduces the time required for you to design and validate molds, with the following enhancements:

• HD3D molded part validation helps you find and correct more design issues with additional checks, such as pocket check which identifies missing pockets in plates.
• The improved wall thickness check enhances your ability to visualize design issues related to sinking and warping by displaying colored spheres and product manufacturing information (PMI).
• Cooling circuit design displays flow direction to guide you through completing circuits, and automates the attachment of fittings.
• Standard parts and mold bases are managed in the knowledge re-use library for faster lookup and drag-and-drop insertion into designs.

Progressive Die Design

New capabilities in NX 8 can help reduce your design time and hit cost targets:

• Quick quotation calculates tool cost from your 3D design data and burden rates.
• Standard parts and die bases are managed in the knowledge re-use library, for faster lookup and drag-and-drop insertion into designs.
• Concurrent design management assists with the management of tool project data, for multiple designers working on the same tool.
• Change-over management helps you create new die designs from families of parts. For example, after you design a die set for the right-handed part, you can automate the creation of left-handed die set.

Engineering Die Design

A new workflow in NX 8 automates the process of designing transfer and tandem dies.

The workflow guides you through the process of designing each die station with specialized tools for formability analysis, and a library of parts for piercing, trimming, punch, forming and die inserts. Standard parts and die bases are managed in a library for fast lookup and drag-and-drop insertion into designs. Material transfer equipment can also be added from the library.

Motion simulation is used to verify that the part transfer and die sequencing perform correctly. You can automatically create the parts list and drawings directly from the 3D solids tool model.

Automotive Stamping Die Design

NX 8 increases die development and die face design productivity with the following new capabilities:

• Standard parts and die bases are managed in the knowledge re-use library for faster lookup and drag-and-drop insertion into designs.
• A set of standard piercing inserts helps accelerate detailed die development work.
• You can validate that trim angles follow manufacturing specifications with an automated check for die trim.
• Capture and re-use standard addendum sections in the knowledge re-use library.
• Accelerate draw punch and die design with specialized features.
• Automate downstream NC programming processes by assigning manufacturing requirements directly to die faces with the manufacturing geometry tool.