Pro-E Mechanism

[Adam D. Bell]

I want to use Pro-E mechanism to analyse our suspension. Has anyone had luck doing this? As of right now I'm not sure how to get this tool to do some basic simulations. Is this just the learning curve or am I doing down a road full of hurt?

[Adam D. Bell]

I want to use Pro-E mechanism to analyse our suspension. Has anyone had luck doing this? As of right now I'm not sure how to get this tool to do some basic simulations. Is this just the learning curve or am I doing down a road full of hurt?

[Conor]

Adam,

I was actually discussing this with Nate last night. I've built fixtures at work with industrial die springs and then tried to use ProE to analyze the compression and other aspects of the spring. The problem I ran into is trying to make a spring a legitimate functioning mechanism within the program the way it would act in real life. Even when I followed tutorials from PTC, I still couldn't get the springs to work. We might be better off searching for another program to analyze the suspension, I'm sure ProE isn't the best route. Has anyone else who uses ProE had any success with getting springs and suspension components to operate as desired in ProE? I would love to hear some pointers from anyone who has.

[Coombesy]

Were u wanting to look at things like camber gain and bump steer or actually do simulations with springs and dampers in it?

I set the front suspension up as a mechanism and used that to check for clearance around parts and did a quick check on bump steer. The mechanism worked fine for me, but i ended up measuring angles to find what I wanted (bump steer) which was tedious.

Good luck, I'm interested to know how u go.

[JP Venturi]

I've used pro/e mechanism for checking camber gain in bump, steer angle difference and progression, bump steer (which was verified on the car),and optimising the installation ratios of our bell cranks to get the desired rates and linearity.

Now, in terms of actually "building" a spring...this involves using the "flexibility" extension of pro/e which is standard, but complicated as f&*k. What i did for some other non related things is actually defined springs and dampers directly in mechanism. Springs in units of lbf(or wtv units you guys use), and dampers in terms of c.

Pro/Mechanism is pretty simple once you get your head around some simple things, like the way to set up your mechanism, where to put your driving motor, and making the appropriate measure features so you can graph and export the simulation to something like excel.

If anyone wants to chat about it hit me up on msn:

jpventuri AT hotmail . com

I promise to keep your designs to myself, and in no way let the influence what i'm doing for our car http://fsae.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_wink.gif lol

[Adam D. Bell]

Thanks for the help McGill_Man. Now when I get time I'll rebuild my assembly