Mass Properties Solution for Aircraft

[dguidry]

I'm wondering what other Aerospace companies have done with mass properties with regards to Windchill. Is there anyone else out there who would like to see a mass properties (weights and balance) solution in Windchill?

For those at companies with mass properties applications, any of them built in Windchill? Anyone using a purchased mass properties solution integrated with Windchill? Has anyone built an in-house mass properties application and connected it with Windchill?

[JoshH]

While our products are peanuts compared to what you guys do Darren, I did have several conversations regarding mass properties while at PTCUser last June. There seems to be a whole interface missing that is not accounting for material properties including weight, volume, finishing (paint), mechanical properties, etc. I'm actually still a little surprised that Pro/E has all this cool functionality of being able to analyse the material to the nth degree, yet not able to communicate any information back to Windchill without creating special parameters, etc.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen much in the way of workarounds, but I too would love to see what other places are doing to account for paint and materials.

[dhermosillo]

I too am disapointed that PTC has not fixed this most basic funtionality.

To get around it we add and designate MASS and DENSITY and add the following relations to every part (put them in the startpart):

MASS=PRO_MP_MASS

DENSITY=PRO_MP_DENSITY

Sometimes you end up having to regenerate a couple times to get the values to match, but we added a ModelCheck gate to check that they are identical and it works pretty well.

[dguidry]

I am actually not looking for any Creo Elements/Pro solution, but a Windchill solution based on product structure. A system where I can define weight budgets and have weight, center of gravity and mass moments of inertia for all part occurances in an aircraft assembly. Weights would be recorded as budgeted, estimated, calculated or measured and the overall weight and balance would be figured on these values.

Now, having Pro/E fill in the calculated weight when appropriate would be fine, but there will be times when it is not available (when the weight is budgeted or estimated and no Creo Elements/Pro model exist) or not appropriate (when there is a measured average weight available).