Assembly and Welding Enhancements

aPriori Professional 2022 R1 SP1 provides these enhancements to automated welding and joining processes in the Assembly process group.

  • Programming Time Estimates for Robotic Welding Processes.

  • Enhanced Contact Region GCD Extraction

Programming Time Estimates for Robotic Welding Processes.

Obtain more accurate Programming Costs for robotic welding processes.

aPriori Professional 2022 R1 SP1 includes estimates of the time required to write and test the program for robotic welding processes. The calculation assumes an average time per individual weld GCD, as shown in the table below. The value is defined in the machine table field Programming Time per Weld, which can be adjusted by a Digital Factory manager. The product of this value and the number of welds gives the total Programming Time, from which the Programming Cost is calculated by using the machine labor rate.

Process Programming Time per Weld

Robotic MIG Welding

300

Robotic Spot Welding

300

Robotic TIG Welding

300

Laser Beam Welding

1800

Electron Beam Welding

1800

Due to this change, welding costs will increase slightly. Programming Cost is amortized over the entire production run so will have a smaller effect as production volumes increase. In a test set of assemblies containing between 40 to 50 welds, with assumed production volumes of 1000, overall cost increased by less than 1%.

Enhanced Contact Region GCD Extraction

Accurately target and isolate contact areas for two mating components.

aPriori Professional 2022 R1 SP1 provides some isolated/targeted enhancements to the new Contact Region GCDs which first were introduced in release 2022 R1. Contact Region GCDs represent areas where two mating components are in contact, and are used to support more automated and mechanistic estimates of various assembly joining processes.

Improved Accuracy in the Calculation of Planar Contact Region Dimensions

aPriori Professional now more accurately calculates the length, width, and area of planar contact regions (where a planar face of one part mates with a planar face of another part). Previously the area and either length or width may have been overestimated. As a result of this change, some estimates of assembly joining processes also may change, but only for customers already using aPriori Professional 2020 R1 and Assembly cost model version 170; earlier releases and cost model versions will not be affected by this change:

  • The number of clamps and therefore clamping time needed for Welding or Adhesive Bonding operations may decrease, compared to the previous release of aPriori.

  • The cycle time to apply Adhesive Bonding or Fay Sealing operations may decrease, compared to the previous release of aPriori.

Atypically Small Contact Area Regions Ignored

aPriori Professional now will not create Contact Region GCDs if the area of contact between two components is less than 0.10 square millimeters or the length of the would-be contact regions is less than 1 millimeter. Such small contacts likely are unintentional CAD modelling errors or do not represent valid joining surfaces. The values of these thresholds are controlled by the site variables minContactRegionAreaMm and minContactRegionLengthMm.