Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of Siemens Industry Automation Division and a global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) products and services, has announced the release of NX 6 digital product development software.
The NX 6 digital product development software provides features driven from Siemens PLM Software’s recently announced synchronous technology.
Product Lifecycle Management Australasia (PLMA), the Siemens PLM master distributor in Australia and New Zealand will be running a series of nation wide seminars focusing on NX 6 and synchronous technology.
“NX 6 delivers on the breakthrough in design productivity we announced last month,” said Joan Hirsch, Vice President of NX product development, Siemens PLM Software.
“We’ve integrated synchronous technology into the NX comprehensive toolset, delivering major enhancements to design, simulation and manufacturing. This release enhances our strong momentum and the market share growth NX is experiencing.”
Four key NX 6 innovations
- Flexibility – NX 6 provides users new flexibility with Design Freedom powered by synchronous technology that leverages the ease of direct editing in the model creation process. Design Freedom now combines advanced constraint-driven techniques with direct modelling in a technology that provides users with up to a 100 times faster design experience than before.
- Strength – NX 6 handles complex problems through comprehensive CAD/CAM/CAE. NX 6 advanced simulation handles the most demanding CAE challenges, providing a 30% reduction in physical prototypes.
- Coordination – The NX 6 unified process enables collaborative product development that leads to 20% faster cycle times through process efficiency improvements such as feature-based machining.
- Productivity – NX 6 provides engineers and designers greater productivity through major re-use enhancements such as scrapbook modelling that can improve cycle times by 40%. With NX 6 engineers gain greater productivity through their ability to leverage multi-CAD data within their design, analysis and manufacturing processes thereby reducing the need to re-master information for improved analysis and machining times.
Design Freedom, powered by synchronous technology for greater flexibility
NX 6 expands the capabilities of Design Freedom with the new synchronous technology application layer. NX 6 Design Freedom provides new approaches to creating and editing geometry.
These improvements make CAD easier for everyone in the product lifecycle, including designers, engineers, analysts and manufacturing engineers.
A new active selection technique adds intelligence to designs when needed. These advanced selection methods automatically recognise logical and feature relationships even on non-native data.
“The Design Freedom capabilities from NX 6 will improve our engineers’ ability to deal with external non-parametric or very complex models,” said Feng Lianguo, Chief Engineer, Hisense Air-Conditioner R&D Centre.
“We can easily and quickly re-use the model or feature not only from old version, but also from other software. It will definitely become a most powerful tool to assist engineers, and it will also improve our modeling method.”
In addition to Design Freedom, NX 6 continues to improve the user experience by providing users with greater flexibility through enhancements to its role-based user interface introduced in NX 5.
Advanced simulation for greater strength
NX 6 continues to deliver on Siemens PLM Software’s Lifecycle Simulation vision, which is to make simulation pervasive throughout the product lifecycle in order to design in quality and drive product innovation.
The new release includes a complete suite of robust multi-disciplinary simulation solutions that meet the needs of advanced CAE analysis experts as well as designers and design engineers.
NX 6 simulation provides extensions to the integrated Advanced Flow and Advanced Thermal solutions. This enables simulation of the complete range of coupled multi-physics, including conduction, forced convection, condensation.
In addition, new FE model correlation capabilities enable CAE engineers to validate the accuracy of their simulation results against real-world performance measurements from physical prototypes. This results in better design decisions at increased levels of accuracy.
Global access to centrally managed data for greater coordination
NX provides greater coordination by integrating CAD/CAM/CAE disciplines across a product’s lifecycle. This unified process accesses centrally managed knowledge to accelerate product development.
Product knowledge is leveraged in downstream applications through product and manufacturing information (PMI) data. NX 6 leverages PMI data to significantly improve the flow of information throughout the lifecycle.
This connects to the feature-based programming automation in NX CAM and reduces NC programming time by 20%.
NX 6 also improves coordination through faster data management capabilities. The new release leverages the recent performance gains offered by the new Teamcenter architecture.
This is particularly important to users working at multiple geographically dispersed locations where the need to interact real time with information is critical.
With access to Geolus Search available inside NX, engineers are now able to search for common parts by characteristics such as size and shape.
Geolus Search is a 3D search engine, which quickly identifies parts based on their geometry characteristics such as size and shape. Geolus search results can include NX parts, JT data or data from other CAD systems.
Re-use throughout the lifecycle for greater productivity
A differentiating feature of NX over competing systems is its ability to capture and re-use knowledge in CAD/CAM/CAE. NX 6 provides key new features that increase product re-use for reduced design time. Design Freedom preserves multi-CAD design intent by allowing users to add intelligence where necessary.
“The new editing capabilities of NX 6, which allow you to easily make fast changes, are really impressive,” said Danila Marco, CAD-CAM Portfolio Manager, Avio S.p.A.