Adding and comparing material properties

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Now that we have our solid model,

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we are quite keen to understand how much the part weighs at this moment in time.

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And to do this, we can apply a material with physical material properties.

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Open up the material browser where you can see properties including density

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thermal conductivity and yield strength.

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The default material applied to all bodies is

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steel which you can change in the preferences.

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I'm going to open the physical material dialogue box and

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apply an aluminum material to our main body here.

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We now want to take the mass of our component and put it in a spreadsheet.

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So we can compare and analyze other materials. In this case, aluminum and A BS

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as well as to compare different wall thickness is

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to check what this value is.

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We can open the properties of our body and find the mass value.

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We can then take this value and place it in the appropriate sell in our spreadsheet.

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I'll then go and edit the show command and change

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its value to three millimeters and repeat the process above.

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We'll put these values into our spreadsheet

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and to help with any design decisions going forwards,

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we can calculate the difference in values when increasing

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or decreasing the wall thickness or changing the material

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finally

01:44

change in material to A BS

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and collect the results of both the two and three millimeter shells.

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Now, we have all this information in our spreadsheet,

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we can compare and contrast between

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different wall fitnesses and different materials.

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This spreadsheet can also be stored in the project folder.

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So other product designers or engineers have access to this information.

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We have our base design in place and we can start to bring

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in other components to analyze how they sit in relation to one another.

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I'm first gonna bring in our fan assembly from the

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data panel and just insert an instance into our design

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then position it roughly in place.

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I now want to make sure that there is

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no interference between the fan and the main body.

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Otherwise we won't be able to assemble the two together

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to check this.

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Open up the interference command and click on the main body and the fan component

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press compute.

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And we'll see if there are any interferences between the two.

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I can see one here on the front face

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which is pretty clear at the start.

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So now I need to create a hole for this to slide through

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by clicking on the main shaft,

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we can see the radius value appear at the bottom right of the canvas.

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I can now make a hole in our main body

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that allows this shaft to sit in without collision.

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If you are 3D printing this, then you may wish to add some tolerances at this stage.

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Although for now, I leave this at the same value

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I can then create a joint between these two and reposition as necessary.