NX sheet metal design provides the design professional with a complete set of tools to efficiently create and manage sheet metal parts based on knowledge of material properties and manufacturing processes. This CAD suite includes features and utilities that incorporate material and process information that allow the model to represent multiple stages in the sheet metal fabrication cycle - such as bends, flanges, cutouts, and other formable features.

NX sheet metal design tools allow companies to apply defaults and standards to the values used in creation of sheet metal parts, based on both industry or company best practices. For example, bend radii values may be fixed within a certain range for a given material thickness based on known manufacturing quality issues.

Folded and unfolded views of sheet metal components can be used in both the 3D environment as well as downstream in 2D documentation and for manufacturing. Unlike sheet metal applications found in other CAD packages, NX enables the full interaction of other parametric modeling operations with sheet metal features within the context of a single part.

Aerospace Sheet Metal Design

NX Aerospace Sheet Metal is an NX modeling application that provides a focused user environment for designing the most common types of sheet metal parts found in an airframe. These parts include the support ribs and brackets that are attached to outer and inner mold line surfaces as well as other internal airframe structures. These nonlinear sheet metal airframe parts are usually hydropressed or break-formed. NX Aerospace Sheet Metal takes the same approach as NX Sheet Metal to provide the user an optimized environment for designing sheet metal parts. Default values based on company and industry standards define common sheet metal parameters such as bend radii, neutral factors and material thickness.

Given the large number of sheet metal parts in a typical airframe, nx aerospace sheet metal helps companies realize significant cost savings and reduced design time. nx aerospace sheet metal extends the nx sight.

• Nonlinear aerospace flanges built to associated surfaces, planes or user-defined parameters
• Aerospace single or twin joggles to easily modify a flange for forming around adjacent structures
• Unform and reform features that apply aerospace industry forming standards for nonlinear flanges and design handbook standards for compensations to joggle flat patterns
• A focused workflow that permits the streamlined creation of all features required to build sheet metal airframe parts including: lightening holes, flange reliefs, corner reliefs, bend reliefs, beads, cutouts, tooling holes, fastener holes and complex flange shaping
• Customer-defined values for thickness, bend radii and neutral factor, allowing the user to change fundamental part properties without redesign
• Intuitive user interface with onscreen handles for dynamic parameter entry and modeling previews to enable users to see what they are creating as they go
• The ability to view the part in its 3D formed state and the 2D flattened state