Mass properties via "Geometry and Parameters" not updating inertias
- January 20, 2024
- 3 replies
- 3022 views
(I'm using Creo 8.0.3.0. Thanks in advance for any help with this!)
Hi, my situation is the following:
I start with a simple single body part file. It starts out with a default PTC_SYSTEM_MTRL_PROPS material assigned. The density field is blank. When I access "Model Properties > Mass Properties > change", I see that "Assigned Material Density" is "missing" and I can't calculate the mass properties. So I adjust the Material Definition to have an arbitrary density value (1e-6 kg/mm^3). This enables me to calculate the mass properties, including mass and inertia.
Next, I want to specify that the part body be 1 kg in mass. So I go to "Model Properties > Mass Properties > change > Define Properties by > Geometry and Parameters". This lets me type in a mass value of "1 kg", and when I click "calculate", it calculates the correct density, given the geometry of the part, to achieve the target mass.
At this point I expect the new density of the geometry to also affect the inertia values. But it is still displaying inertia values from before I assigned the 1 kg mass, from the older, arbitrary density value. This breaks my expectations, because I wanted to use Creo to assist in calculating the inertia of parts and assemblies, simply by assigning target mass values to the part geometries. Instead, I need to manually calculate the required density given a target mass and the particular geometry volume and create+assign a new material with that calculated required density.
It feels like this functionality is just a step away for the CAD software, since it's clearly already figured out the new density given the geometry and the mass target. Can this be enabled or achieved in native Creo Parametric?
I've attached a pictorial of a simple test I performed, for others to reproduce the issue.
(I am aware that Creo Simulate/Mechanism has a different mass properties feature that may do a similar thing, but it's not a scalable workflow for our team).

