About Merging Stacking

This is how the merging is done.

The Composites information from the second stacking are transferred to the current representation:

• Composites parameters and their contents
• Stacking and its content (plies groups, sequences and plies or cores). Plies and cores come with their properties and the contour is added "as result", corresponding to the last contour found in the origin representation:
  • Merge Stacking gathers all plies and computes all prerequisites for the features under the stacking (for example, for a ply group, the rosette, the lying surface, and the material information and then recursively their prerequisites).
  • Merge Stacking does not gather logical information (Composites parameters, grid information).
  • On the Composites geometry, Merge Stacking gathers the result of the last contour (not its specification, hence, not its constructing elements such as parallels, ramp supports, slicing curves.) and the lying surface.
  • Then the destination representation is created only with the elements gathered, that is, the plies contour is "as result", without link to any geometry but the lying surface (history of the contour is not transferred) and all the features constituting the engineering contour are merged as one single result contour.
  • This "as result" contour is manageable as any other contour (for example, material excess or a dart can be applied to it.
  • The synchronization of the destination representation vs. modified original Composites representation is enabled. The destination representation is always synchronized using "as result" mechanism. If a limit contour is added to a ply in the origin representation, after synchronization, the destination ply still has one single contour but it corresponds to the modified contour from the origin representation.

This explains how to avoid the duplication of similar objects.

Let us consider a Composites part, split between several users, each of them working on a given sub-area of it.

If each user creates its own Composites parameters with link to a given unique material, during the merge process unique IDs are added to each cache material feature, hence creating two different material cache features, although they are similar (pointing to the same material reference). The same applies to any objects receiving different IDs during the merge process.

To avoid this, share the same entities in the different representations using the standard collaboration mechanism. One possible process is:

• Prepare the destination representation with Composites parameters, rosette, and support surface.
• Then using the collaboration native product, share all those features and merge them in the representation used by individual users. This provides the uniqueness of collaboration IDs across all of them.
• As the Composites parameters and their contents, draping surface, rosette share the same unique collaboration ID, the merge process recognizes them and hence avoids the duplication of similar objects.