Power, flexibility and control improve design productivity
The NX MACH software products are prepackaged solutions delivering high performance computer-aided design (CAD) capabilities of NX software, the leading solution for mechanical design. They offer competitively priced solutions tailored to specific product development roles, practices and processes, in four performance tiers. Value-added upgrades are available to move customers from one tier to the next. Each package delivers complete capabilities for production work.
NX MACH 1, 2 and 3 solutions include engineering process management capabilities for improved design team collaboration. Optional extended engineering process management tools provide scalable collaboration and advanced management.
All of the NX MACH design solutions share a common denominator of high-performance CAD functions and the ability to use powerful high-definition 3D (HD3D) Visual Reporting, enabling designers and engineers to quickly understand key elements of their www.siemens.com/nx designs. Each level of the solutions builds upon the other, providing increasingly more sophisticated and advanced design capabilities.
NX MACH Designer
This entry-level solution offers tools for creating and editing designs of typical mechanical components and assemblies, with solid modeling and drafting, basic freeform modeling and sheet metal design. It includes tools for design review, rapid prototyping, web publishing, validation checking, re-use library and custom program execution. It also offers design-oriented stress and vibration analysis wizards.
NX Layout
NX Layout is a fully integrated 2D concept design solution for NX. Built on proven NX technology, the software employs re-usable 2D components to enhance 2D concept design. Further, it can automatically create assembly structures based on 2D layouts to accelerate the detailed design phase. NX Layout provides a number of dedicated tools to support 2D design and layout, as well as 2D-to-3D capabilities.
NX MACH 1 Design
This solution delivers all the capabilities of NX MACH Designer, plus a managed environment powered by Teamcenter® software, with data management and visualization capabilities for product and process management.
NX MACH 2 Product Design
The MACH 2 Product Design package provides enhanced product design capabilities, including flexible printed circuit board design, validation checking, user-defined features, rendering, 3D annotation for Product and Manufacturing Information (PMI) and basic routing.
NX Cool Shape Design
NX Cool Shape Design is a modeling-only environment delivering NX tools for fast and easy development of complex shapes. NX Cool Shape Design includes the advanced freeform tools and NX Realize Shape subdivision modeling.
NX MACH 3 Product Design
The MACH 3 Product Design package provides a high-performance solution with NX design capabilities for advanced assembly design, advanced freeform modeling and surface analysis, design optimization and molded part validation.
NX MACH 3 Industrial Design
MACH 3 Industrial Design delivers a broad range of NX design tools, and extends the freeform modeling capabilities with NX Realize Shape, bringing powerful subdivision modeling capabilities into the NX environment.
Enhancing basic design through production
The NX MACH design software packages deliver comprehensive and scalable digital product development system from Siemens PLM Software that addresses all stages of the product development process, from basic design through production.
The NX MACH packages transform the product development process and support dynamic change within organizations by:
- Increasing innovation throughout the product development process
- Eliminating waste by better utilizing time, material and intellectual resources
- Improving quality from the beginning
The NX MACH design solutions offer the following advantages:
- Unified solution – seamless application integration rapidly propagates changes to product and associated process information
- Engineering process management – fully integrated, synchronized product data and process knowledge management
- Knowledge-driven automation – re-use of product and process knowledge across all elements and phases of product development
- Integrated simulation and validation – comprehensive simulation and validation tools check product performance and manufacturability throughout every step of product development
NX MACH design capabilities
Design modeling
Feature-based solid modeling
The core modeling capability in NX combines wireframe, surface, solid, parametric and direct modeling in a single environment that enables designers to choose the most appropriate tool for the task at hand. NX delivers full feature-based parametric solid modeling and advanced features including blends, thin-wall, draft, mirrored features, open profile features and patterns. In addition, direct modeling with synchronous technology offers a fast and intuitive approach to creating and editing designs using simple push-and-pull methods, and enables you to work directly with CAD geometry created on with other systems. For greater versatility and design flexibility, you can use synchronous modeling interchangeably with all of the other modeling tools. A configurable, role-based user interface displays the commands you need as you need them, and grows as your experience level grows.
DesignLogic
DesignLogic enables users to add design intent or knowledge as needed in the form of formulas and expressions. For example, a designer may want to drive the dimensions of a feature using a formula or mathematical expression. DesignLogic allows rich control of design parameters both at creation time and during future modification.
A powerful set of associative measurements allows a designer to not only use measurements as a tool in sizing and locating new features in the design, but also monitor critical dimensions of a design. You can also easily add validation checks to any design parameter or associative measurement. These validation checks can be created on-the-fly or can be linked to external sources of design requirements, such as Microsoft Excel® spreadsheets. Validation checks help notify a designer if the value of a model expression ever strays from appropriate limits. Thus, DesignLogic helps a designer create smarter, self-checking designs that meet design requirements.
User-defined features (UDFs)
Designers using NX can capture and store families of features for easy retrieval, editing and re-use. Userdefined features enable designers to establish relationships between parameters, define feature variables, set default values and decide the general form the feature will take. Existing UDFs reside in a re-use library that is accessible by anyone using NX modeling.
Assembly design
NX assembly design supports top-down and bottom-up assembly modeling. It provides for rapid navigation of the assembly hierarchy and allows direct access to the design model of any component or subassembly. It supports the “design in context” approach where changes can be made to any component of the design model while working in the context of the assembly.
NX MACH design packages include tools for building and manipulating assembly structures. The use of inter-part relationships enables the creation of parametric assemblies that capture and preserve the design intent whenever changes are made.
Assemblies can be easily traversed using the assembly navigator in conjunction with intelligent component searching capabilities. NX assemblies also include support for the creation of flexible assemblies and parts, enabling different arrangements and configurations of components such as springs and pistons.
Advanced assembly modeling
The advanced assembly modeling capabilities in MACH 3 packages enable you to simplify components or subassemblies into a single lightweight solid, to enclose assembly geometry in an envelope of planar faces, to partition assemblies into meaningful regions, and to manage weight and other mass properties of components and assemblies. Component filtering techniques allow users to quickly identify and load the components of relevance to their current task, avoiding unnecessary delays and screen clutter caused by loading irrelevant components.
Assembly enveloping techniques enable the user to represent major subassemblies as simplified abstractions to further reduce assembly load times and avoid the display of unwanted or proprietary interior detail. The sophisticated clearance analysis and weight management tools provided in advanced assemblies are also optimized for analyzing potential problems with fit, clearance and mass properties.
Active mockup
A complete digital mockup capability extends the toolset for building, editing and evaluating assembly models. It is especially useful when working with large assemblies, but also helps improve the productivity of most users who work regularly in an assembly context. Active mockup makes use of the standard, CAD-neutral, lightweight JT™ data format. This improves the performance and memory efficiency of loading and designing in the context of massive assemblies.
WAVE control
NX WAVE is a geometry linking tool that enables designers to define interpart relationships for parametric assembly modeling. WAVE assembly control structures and constraints help simplify design changes and accelerate modeling of configurations, options and variants. Basic freeform modeling Basic freeform modeling in NX provides tools for creating complex surface and solid models. Capabilities include:
- Creating solids from sheets
- Basic sweeping along curves
- Proportionally developed shapes using 1-, 2- and 3-rail methods
- Lofting – ruled, curve mesh, lofted shapes using standard conic methods and meshes of points and curves
- Special surface creation – surface extension and n-sided, bounded plane offset
- Surface manipulation tools – surface extension and surface normal control
- Body-based trimming
- Surface trimming using curves
Advanced freeform modeling
Advanced freeform modeling extends the toolset to include complex filleting, blends and transition surfaces. Guided assistance accelerates the creation of solids from sheets, and the software also helps create surfaces from external point, pole and point cloud data. It includes general-purpose design and manufacturing sweeps and flanges, including dynamic law extensions, silhouette flanges, ribbons and sectional sweeps. Designers can shape surfaces by direct point and pole manipulation, and with boundary, degree and stiffness controls. Surfaces can be trimmed, extended, offset, combined, divided or enlarged. Advanced surface analysis tools provide real-time graphical feedback that assists in analytical and visual evaluation of surface quality.
Freeform shape design
Freeform shape design enables designers to create conceptual surfaces for quickly capturing initial design intent, as well as creating and editing curves directly on surfaces. It has direct surface modeling capabilities that maintain associative surface boundary continuity controls ranging from G0 to G3. Styled sweeps associatively sweep profile curves along multiple guides, and advanced surface trimming creates cut surfaces independent of original surfaces.
NX Realize Shape
NX Realize Shape uses subdivision modeling methods to enable customers to develop high-quality advanced 3D product forms in a fraction of the time required by traditional tools. NX Realize Shape is fully integrated with other NX modeling functions, allowing advanced shapes to be built and combined with traditional modeling approaches to develop advanced shapes quickly and easily.