Bar and Tube Fabrication Enhancements

Improved Recognition of Round Tube Stock for Highly Deformed Parts

aPriori continues to make incremental improvements to the Bar & Tube Fabrication process group to better recognize the intended stock form from which a part is made and to correctly identify all features modeled on the part. These changes significantly improve aPriori’s ability to analyze a part and correctly estimate material and process costs.

Building on the work completed in the previous three releases, aPriori 2025 R1 SP1 continues to become more tolerant of variations in CAD modeling approaches and has taken a significant step forward in the recognition of round tube stock for parts that have large amounts of deformation from the starting stock. These improvements include:

• More frequently recognizing when a part is intended to be made from a standard round tube stock rather than a custom extruded stock

• Correctly recognizing geometry intended to represent bends or forms, rather than designating them as NotSupported GCDs

• Identifying the correct stock length, even in the presence of poorly modeled bends and forms

Specifically, this release focused on developing a new algorithm that better identifies the presence of both deformed and non-deformed round tube geometry within a part, and better represents how regions with these two types of geometry connect with one another. This results in not only the correct round tube cross section being selected but better recognition of both forms on the tube and the length of the part. Identifying the correct stock form and length are critical for accurate material cost estimates.

Below is a simple example that shows the difference between this release and the previous one:

• Correct stock selection and stock length:

  • Previously, aPriori incorrectly extracted this part's stock as a round bar and did not detect the correct stock length (since it omitted the part's bend and flattened sections):

    

  • In this release, the stock form is correctly recognized as Round Tube, and stock length includes the bend and flattened sections:

    

• Better form and bend recognition:

  • Previously, highly deformed areas were sometimes extracted as NotSupported GCDS:

    

  • Now, aPriori detects the forms and bends: