Structural Member Extrusions

This is another often used family. The savings for this family aren't as much in the amount of disk space used, but in the amount of time saved by having the profiles already created. Since the use of the profile varies from project to project and even within a project, these are merely templates. When designers need to use a structural member, they just copy the profile from the library directory into another part. Then, all that is needed, is to extrude the profile into the required beam.

The original concept for this family was that the profiles would be extruded to a unit length, and then the user would modify the extrusion to the proper length. However, these beams are not always used as straight extrusions. They can also be curved, or even follow an arbitrary path. By not having the extrusion operation in the library parts, the parts are more flexible, and also take up less disk space.

The savings from this family is again the time saved by having the profiles already made. Instead of having to search through a parts catalog to find the proper beam dimensions, and then having to find another specification that lists the various dimensions not given by the catalog, such as the angles of the flanges, and the fillets and rounds in the inside corners, the designer merely enters the desired sizes in the search engine, and is then given the name of the appropriate profile.

Despite the fact that these profiles look fairly simple, they can be rather difficult to create accurately. The exception to this is the sharp corner group of parts which can be modeled simply as the wireframe union of to or three wireframe rectangles. If the beams that aren't simply squares are modeled as square cornered, which designers often do to save time, that can cause errors in interference checking, or other mass property calculations.

Last Modified: Wed Aug 28 14:41:29 EDT 1996