ABSTRACT
This paper presents an automated system that can effectively support human work, thereby speeding up the Computer Aided Designing process. The motivation of the research and development task was to implement a module in an existing CAD system which can calculate the center of gravity, which requires investigating the distribution of the mass. There were complex CAD models designed in the application called Siemens NX. It has some built-in functions for designers for supporting the calculations. The first chapter of the paper overviews the mathematical background of the calculation. For software development point of view, the authors investigated the programming facilities of Siemens NX. Investigations showed that the first task is to assign material properties for the components that are in the design. Our goal was to automate this task as the manual material attribute assignment is time-consuming and potentially leads to errors. To perform this task, the relevant documentation and literature have been reviewed. A recently published model carries out material assignments by identifying the relationship between shape, functionality, and material in parts. There is a study that analyses the basic concepts and relationships affecting all aspects of material selection. In this paper, a new software component is presented, providing an approach for material assignment. The center of gravity calculation based on the valid material data then provides a reliable result. The Siemens NX software plug-in developed by the authors has been installed and actively used by our industrial partner.
