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To Cut a U-shape Groove on Cylinder Surfa

justig

New member
I am trying to create grooves on a sensor, which is in the shape of cylinder. These grooves will be used for winding a electrical coil to heat the sensor. The wire is a single piece, and it starts from one end and is wound in circles to other end. Then the wire is bent in U shape and is wound in the same way back to the starting end with a 2 mm gap between wires. I have used hellical sweep cut to create grooves. The problem is how to join the two grooves in U-shape on a cylinder surface. I have tried to create a datum plane on the cylinder surface and then use sweep cut, but I am not getting the uniform cut since it's a cylinder surface. Please suggest
 
Hello jeff4136,

Thanks for replying.
I need same thing like that expect that it has to be a cut in a semi-circle groove with varying pitch. Also can we change the dimension at the bend area(cos the wire to be bent is pretty stiff and we need a bigger bend radii).
I am having probelm opening the file in Pro/E.
I use Pro E Wildfire 2.0 version.
I would really be thankful if you can tell me how it is done.
 
Hi, Jag:

Not sure why the problem opening the file; if the problem is on my end, your end or if Bill Gates has screwed up all things ZIP with WinXP. I downloaded the posted file and opened it in WF2. I'm running on a Win2K system.

View attachment 740

... shows model construction. The boundary blend between the two helical ribbon ends will not allow much flexibility in "U" bend radius (determined by helix pitch, for the most part). You might try just putting some datum points on a cyl surf and creating a datum curve constrained to the cyl surf to do the transition. It'll be sort of "freehand" but will work. Another option might be to Wrap a planar sketch onto the cylinder for the transition. Possibly extending one helical curve, rather than just doing a Moved Copy will ... lot's of possibilities, but I'd just have to try them to see what will work well. If you can't get something working and can post an example of what you are starting with maybe someone can offer some additional help.
 
Is it something that u want to make?


u_shape_cut_on_cyl_sol.jpg
u_shape_cut_on_cyl_lin.jpg
 
First a question: The larger images posted above, side by side, cause the browser (IE) page to go to about three screen widths in size. Is this something that can be rectified?

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2005-03-20_080423_swept_groove.prt.rar shows how I'd go about cutting the groove. Sweeping in and out of the solid body in a single operation will avoid some headaches. You might also note that your part has a Geom Check caused by trying to sweep the near coincident lines on the semi-circle profiles. Using full circle profiles results in a much easier to calculate boolean operation.

View attachment 744

Hope that's something close to what you want to do. Also note, if it's a concern, the minimum rad is a function of the combination of the 2D profile rads and cylinder rad, so will be smaller than profile rad.
 

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