About Technological Impacts

In a Component, you can specify its impacts on its future environment. This is a great way to save time.

This also provides Machining operations with useful information to define machining strategies for this element (more so than only defining the final result of all manufacturing operations).

Impacts specifications have types.

Those types can be:

• Drilling operations (drilling, spot drilling, reaming, threading when thread is always required).
• Conditional threading operations that are fixing operations to be applied to the plate and cast only. This plate/cast must be the furthest from the Component head.
• Surfacing operations.
• Over-thickness operation (addition of material, for example for Styrofoam allowance).

Some rules have to be respected.

Following Impacting geometries are proposed:

• Drill Hole
• Tap Hole
• Pad
• Pocket
• Assembly Protected
• Assembly Added

Impacting geometries are created in Define Component.

By default the type of Impacting Geometries of type Drill Hole, Tap Hole, Pad or Pocket is deduced from the body name. For example, a body entitled "DrillHole" (without white space) generates a DrillHole Assembly Feature.

Impacting geometries are used to compute impacts. Their type is automatically applied with a mechanical meaning. For example, if a CapScrew impacts a set of Plates, the Tap Hole is applied to the last plate and the Drill Hole is applied to the other plates.

Holes information is transmitted to the NC machining through the Technological Result.

Impact specifications are represented by published Assembly Features.

Those Assembly Features are published as:

• Drill Hole for Drilling operations
• Tap Hole for Fixing operations
• Pad for Over-thickness operations.
• Pocket for Surfacing operations
• Assembly Added for Over-thickness operations.
• Assembly Protected for Surfacing operations.

Impacts are specified by geometry.

• The expected geometry of the Drill Hole is holes, threaded or not.
  Notes:

  • In the case Part Design or Functional Plastic Parts do not provide the expected types, you can include several features or Power Copies or user features, provided they correspond to a single machining operation.
  • Because it is not known how many tool elements are impacted by the Component, it is useful to create long holes in the Component definition. This way, the drilling operation is adapted to any design of Tool.
• The expected geometry of the Tap Hole is a threaded hole.
• The expected geometry of the Pocket and Assembly Protected is any negative feature, such as a Pocket.
• The expected geometry of the Pad and Assembly Add is any positive feature, such as Pad.

Manufacturing intent specification regards color of Assembly Features and user parameters.

Colors of Assembly Features are transmitted to the faces of the impacted tool elements.

User parameters associated to hole features inside Assembly Features are transmitted to the impacted Tool elements faces, as Technological Results.

Rules ordering impacts are as follows.

Ordered impact rules are available as follows:

Assembly Feature		Description	Ordered Impact Rules
Drill Hole		Remove	Yes
Tap Hole		Remove + Thread	Yes
Pad		Add	Yes
Pocket		Remove	Yes
Assembly Protected		Remove	No
Assembly Added		Add	No

Ordered impact rules apply to all types of Components, with a variant for Baffle an SpiralBaffle.

If there is more than one type of Assembly Feature or more than one impacted representation, like in the example below where the yellow representations are Drill Holes and the green one is a Tap Hole

• Drill Holes are applied to all impacted representations, but the last one if the Component does not go through it.
• Tap Hole is applied to the last representation only, unless the Component goes through it.
• Pad and Pocket are always applied to the first impacted representation.

If there is one Assembly Feature and several impacted representations, like in the example below where the representation in green is From, the purple one is Between and the yellow one is To

the ordered impact rules work as follows.

Assembly Feature	Result on From	Result on Between	Result on To
Drill Hole	Drill Hole	Drill Hole	Drill Hole
Tap Hole	-	-	Tap Hole
Pad	Pad	-	-
Pocket	Pocket	-	-

If there are several Assembly Features and one impacted representation, like in the example below where the Components circles in blue go through the impacted representation and the one circled in purple does not go through the impacted representation

the ordered impact rules work as follows.

Assembly Feature	Result if the Component goes through the impacted representation	Result if the Component does not go through the impacted representation
Drill Hole	-	Drill Hole
Tap Hole	Tap Hole	-
Pad	-	Pad
Pocket	-	Pocket

If there are several Assembly Features and several impacted representations, like in the example below where the representation in green is From, the purple one is Between and the yellow one is To, with one Component going through the last impacted representation

the ordered impact rules work as follows.

Assembly Feature	Result on From	Result on Between	Result on To
Drill Hole	Drill Hole	Drill Hole	If Component goes through the last impacted representation the result is a Drill Hole. No result otherwise.
Tap Hole	-	-	If Component does not go through the last impacted representation the result is a Tap Hole. No result otherwise.
Pad	Pad	-	-
Pocket	Pocket	-	-