Motor Armature Winding

[bschafer]

I work for a company that produces fractional horsepower DC motors. We've slowly been switching over from 2-D Cadkey to solid modeling for about 4 years now, starting with Pro-E and just recently switching to SolidWorks. There is one area though that we've had trouble figuring out what to do, and that is showing the winding of the armature in the assembly. I'm curious, is there anyone out there who knows of some unique way to show this? I could always just add a couple domes to each side of the stack and call it good, but before I do that I'm interested to see if there is a more pictorially correct way to do this that isn't overly time consuming. Any suggestions? Thanks!

 

[SBaugh]

I worked for a company for 5 years (2 years ago) making small electric motors in SW. The way I used to make the windings was with a single revolved feature ( kind of like your domes you specified above, but different). Of course SW has improved since then, but making X amount of windings around the armature with a wire is almost impossible to do or simulate in SW or any program for that matter. At least it was then, and I'm pretty sure you really don't want to do it because of the performance hit you will take.

Best way to do it, is to KIS (keep it simple) and either make 2 domes or my personal favorite the single revolved feature. If you need an example of what I'm talking about just let me know.

In a drawing I might add an area hatch to show the windings but that was detailed as I got.

I hope that helps, Scott Baugh, CSWP
3DVision Technologies

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376
When in doubt, always check the help

 

[MadMango]

I just did a small test... just because I'm bored.

I hobbled together a model of a armature, 2"OD X 3"L. I extruded the body of the armature as 1 feature, then drew a spline to represent my exposed windings. Then extruded a .075 circle for the winding itself. This I applied a Circular Pattern to, then I Mirrored it to the other end. Instand armature.

9 features, 1 solid body, 5mb file size, 40.44 seconds for Rebuild. Kind of hefty, and it would definately slow down a model.

I then Save As a parasolid, and brought it back into SW and saved it as a normal SLDPRT.

1 feature, 1 solid body, 3mb file size and only .05 seconds for Rebuild. This is much better to work with.

So I guess the question lies in how stable your motor designs are going to be. If they are things that you won't be changing constantly, it might be worth the foot work to model the windings, and have "dumb solids" at the end of the day. Ray Reynolds
Senior Designer
Read: faq731-376
"Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities."