About Spools

This section explains the principle of spools.

A spool groups together components in your design and is used typically to define a group of physical objects that are manufactured as an assembly.

The simple HVAC system shown below may be manufactured in a factory as two separate assemblies and then joined together on site. In the HVAC Design apps, the components of each assembly are grouped together in two separate spools.

Manufactured assembly A = Spool A, Manufactured assembly B = Spool B:

This section explains the two spool modes.

A spool can have one of these two modes:

• In Preliminary Design Mode
• In Manufacturing Mode

The mode determines how the members (components) of a spool are connected within the tree. Each mode is suited to different stages in the design process:

• In In Preliminary Design Mode, the members of the spool are associated with the spool using links.

  When you first create a spool, it is assigned In Preliminary Design Mode by default.

  This mode must be used for pre-definition of spools, at the start of the design process. It has the following characteristics:

  • Advantage: This mode provides you with flexibility in the design process as only links are managed.
  • Disadvantages:
    • This mode is not supported with DELMIA.
    • Weight and center of gravity are not supported.

• In In Manufacturing Mode, the members of the spool are grouped directly under the spool; no links are required.

  You can edit an In Preliminary Design Mode spool and set it to In Manufacturing Mode, however, once you have done this, you cannot change it back to In Preliminary Design Mode.

  This mode should be used once the spools have been defined, when the design is mature. It has the following characteristics:

  • Advantages:
    • Supported with DELMIA.
    • Weight and center of gravity are supported because the components do not belong to the spool.
  • Disadvantages:
    • Moving a product to another spool takes more time as you need to reroute the MCX and contextual links.
    • Deleting a spool using the context menu also deletes the spool members (unless they are moved manually beforehand). If you delete the spool using Modify > Delete in the context toolbar, the members of the spool are moved to their parents and only the spool is deleted.

This section lists the functions available for working with spools.

Using the tools in the Spool context toolbar, you can:

• Create spools.
• Delete spools.
• Add components to a spool.
• Delete components from a spool.
• Convert an In Preliminary Design Mode spool to an In Manufacturing Mode spool.
• Transfer a component from a spool to another existing spool.
• Transfer a component from a spool to a new spool.

This section lists the design rules to follow to create a spool.

All elements of the spool:

• are closely connected.
• belong to the same line ID.

One element cannot belong to two different spools.