Interesting that you mention that since this functionality was one of the first things I used Unigraphics (AKA NX) for when I started using it 36 years ago. We designed machinery used to produce food products (bread and rolls to be specific) and back in the 70's we needed to redesign many of our machines in an attempt to avoid using paint (USDA was getting picky about stuff that might chip-off a machine and end-up in a loaf of bread or a hamburger bun). Up until then, most of our machines frames were welded steel tubing and rolled shape strutures but as we started to use other metals, mostly stainless ateel and aluminum, it soon became apparent that while we could basically replace the mild steel shapes with stainless, it was very expensive. Therefore we started to look into using more aluminum profiles and while we could again do an almost one-for-one replacement, due to the difference in the yield strength of aluminum versus steel, for many situations we had to increase the size which then led to higher cost due to using more material. Well we finally realized that since you could basically buy aluminum extrusions in virtually any shape you desired, we should design custom profiles with the intention of getting maximum ridgidty with the least cross section, even going so far as to design some cross member profiles with specific sized cores which would accept large self-threading fasteners which eliminated not only extra hardware (no lock washers and nuts) but also resulted in even more sanitary designs since what threads were now completely hidden.
Anyway, I was given the job of designing these profiles, determining their section moduli as well as cross sectional area, profile perimeter and minimum included circle size (these last three numbers were used by our aluminum vendor when they quoted tooling costs and production costs). So for about a year I was doing this manually by making full-size hand-drawn profiles and then using a 'planimeter', a really cool little watch-like mechanism, to compute the area of the 2D profiles (but only if you were really careful tracing the profile of course):
Of course, even with that data I still needed to calculate the section modulus using transform coordinates.
When we bought our first Unigraphics system, which we really justified so as to help get toolpaths generated to keep our machine shop busy, we didn't even know this functionality existed. Then about a month later I was messing around and discovered this capability, which was great. It took me maybe half-a-day per profile to do it manually, but now in a single afternoon I could knock-out a half-dozen fully drawn and documented designs. Later, while attending a Users Meeting, I met some people from Alcoa and Alcan, two of the earliest users of Unigraphics, and they explained that they had both demanded that this capability be part of Unigraphics since it was so key to enhancing the productivity of their extrusion business.
If you look at the options on the menu below, you'll see what I mean when I say it included all of the types of info that would be important for anyone designing extruded profiles, their tooling and then quoting the cost of the final extrusions:
John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:
To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
