Plate/shell model

[warrenw]

Does anyone know if it is possible to develope a plate/shell 3D model with Inventor 7 that does not have a thickness?
It's like drawing a circle and then extruding just the circle as a hollow pipe with no wall thickness.

I am trying to create a 3D model that will represent a vessel with a nozzle that will be inputed into an older(1999) Algor FEA program as thin walled plate/shell elements. The thickness is inputed during the decoding stage based on the vessel's wall color.

I'm having trouble inputing a solid wall model with different surface colores into the Algor program.
It keeps coming up as all one color.
I need different surface colors to idenify what surfaces will be loaded with pressure.

So,can a plate/shell model be created with Inventor 7 ?

 

[jlcochran1]

Have you tried extruding as a surface instead of a solid? In IV 8 select surface vs solid for output type in the dialog box. I thought IV 7 had the same option.

 

[warrenw]

jlcochran1;
Thanks for the reply.
I tried what you said and it will create a picture of what I'm looking for, unfortunatly Inventer will not let me save it as an IEGS file (which is what the Algor program is looking for).
I also tried sweeping the circle along a line and came up with the same results.

 

[jlcochran1]

Interesting. When attempting a "save copy as" in Inventor 8 to iges format it appears to save correctly, with iges options. However the file created has an .xlo extension and cannot be reopened by Inventor. FYI, I was able to create a similar surface in SolidWorks 2003 and save as iges and then open in Inventor.

 

[aepeszel]

Try making your part then remove face(s) that you do not want.

 

[SeanDotson]

There should be 2 files. XLO and IGES files. Use the IGES. Alos ALGOR should be able to read in a STEP or SAT file. These can be exported from Inventor as well.

None of these formats will retain color information.

Sean Dotson, PE
Autodesk Inventor Certified Expert

http://www.sdotson.com

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