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Large Assy Management

gcook

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I am tasked with determining Pro/E capabilities relative to our current methods of designing large assemblies. I would like to know what other users are doing on the job to design large assemblies. I am interested in hearing what actual users are doing to create large assemblies (not PTC methods). In specific...has anybody been designing large assemblies in master rep form and how/hardware? or....Are users only using simplified reps and similar techniques. At my current position we use simplified reps to open assemblies of large capacity and very rarely open the higher level assemblies in master rep form due to there size. My company isprobing the possiblity to open and manipulate the master.There are lots of companies designing large assemblies so are we all just simply not opening the master of these assemblies ever and solely relying on reps? I am very interested in responses from my fellow Pro/E's out there. Thanks!
 
Any chance of quantifying what you mean by a large assembly. Does the
top level assembly have 10,000 or 100,000 parts in it or only a few
thousand parts, some of which have have 500 to 5,000 features.



Have you looked into Simplify Interchange assemblies and Shrink Wrapping





DB
 
I have 3+6 thousand parts in my asm. There no problem opening the master on 1gig. but we have sub asm and reps to because its so slow with every thing open. We have sub asm because one person can work on one sub and someone else can work on the other ones. Are asm have piping and wire harness. But we only have a few part that are big in features and we alway have a shrink wrapped engine.


why would you want to work in the master?


You can do it it just going to be slow.


if you want to see if it's going to work for you just try it.
 
Thanks for the responses, greatly appreciated!


Dell_Boy: To quantify the assembly size, lets just say they are 5000 to 10,000 components (typically). We can open most of our higher sub-level assemblies in master rep form but not necessarily the top-levels in master rep (fails to open when attempted). I am trying to find out if others who are designing large assemblies are capabable of opening more or if we are taking the correct approach byonly using simplified reps, interchanges, shrinkwraps and similar techniques (which we "are" currently doing).


I was just curious if other companies working with large assemblies are working exclusively with master data or simplified versions of that data or hardware differences (we use 32bit)??? Not sure if 64bit is worth considering at this time or not??? Any experiences with this on the job?
 
We have probably the largest assemblies in our company. It is not uncommon to max out the memory on our workstations. Our memory size is 4096M. Our large Assemblies have between 25 and 50 thousand components depending if you are counting the same parts each time they are used. The Larges Assembly file size is 39443.8Kb. We cannot pull up our master rep without the system crashing. We utilize Simp Reps unless there is a specific subsystem that requires the use of Master Rep. We do run Master Rep when we are verifying interfaces, interference and clearance checking and for specific motion profiles.
 
I'm working with large assemblies (my assemblies have got over 70 000 components, regarding if I count the same parts). I use simp rep all the time, and I'm opening master rep also but sometimes is impossible to work in master so I use it only for regenerating whole asm, and continue working in simp rep. Also I'm using skeletons, shrink wrap and a lot time dummy assemblies and parts (for combination in drawing with master reps), if you want to know more about dummy parts and asm let me know.
Furthermore good confing options for working with large asm is important (I can say it speeds it up to 30%), here is list what I have in my config.pro set:


lods_value5
lods_enabledyes
fasthlryes
save_displayyes
display_in_adding_view minimal_wireframe
display_silhouette_edges no
retain_display_memory yes
frames_per_sec yes
frames_per_sec_value2
force_wireframe_in_drawings yes


I think there are more of options but those are most important.


Problem with 32bit windows is because it has limit of usage of memory in single process (which is xtop - Proe process in windows) so for example if you are opening huge assembly file and memory usage of xtop exceed about 880 Mb (I'm not sure of real limit but when we tried oppening our asm it crashed alway around 880 Mb) of RAM windows kills xtop process and you are unable to open your files. However there is a trick to tweak windows to be able to have limit up to 3Gb of single process memory usage, but I recommend 64 bit windows and Proe.
Hope it helps!
 
We use


1)Load Large Assy Config .pro to open large assy


2)Load Large Drawing Config .pro to open large crawing


3)We make sure that all lower level sub assy should have shrinkwraps rep insted of master rep


4)We check out most of the time all parts including instances (checkout with all inster if Required)


5)If we needs to update drawing only: first open dawing with no views then resume all views on one sheet then next sheet.


6)We will not open any other application becasue of RAM allocation issues


7)We have Dell Precision 670 dual processerwith 256mb Graphic card of Nvidia and 4GB RAM


8)We do setting on xtop to handle more that 2GB Image (I hope this can be done only with 4GB RAM workstations


Let me know if you have any questions.


Regards


PALLESREDDY
 
I'm working on assemblies with upwards of 10K parts. Most of which are fasteners, simple sheet metal and tubing components.
In Master, it bogs down enough to make me crazy. I'm working on a Lenovo W520 mobile workstation with 16 GB Ram and a I7-1760 QM processor.
 

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