Are you maximizing your nesting efforts?

Cost reduction seems to be today’s mantra in the manufacturing community. All aspects of a design that can result in cost are scrutinized, and measures are taken to prevent those unwanted and costly elements from making it into final designs.

Material and manufacturing costs are two major elements that influence total product cost. Through thoughtful design, both costs can be controlled or limited at the early design stage itself.

Read more at http://www.thefabricator.com/article/cadcamsoftware/are-you-maximizing-your-nesting-effortsr

Design parts as near rectangle as possible - An assembly example

An electrical cabinet design was originally designed with two parts as shown below.

The assembly contains a T-shaped non-rectangular part. To improve nesting quality, T-shaped part is redesigned into two near rectangular parts. This simple redesign improves material utilization and hence scrap area (Gray shaded) is less and remnant area is more (Pink shaded) as shown below.A saving of 4.583kg is observed for just two assemblies. For customizing nesting application in your CAD modeler, contact tech.sales@geometricglobal.com.

Design your components for maximum material utilization

Material cost governs a major share of product cost in sheet metal products and hence it is advisable to design parts/assemblies for maximum material utilization. All opportunities which can result in improved material utilization have to be analyzed. An interesting case is shown in Fig 1 which gave an utilization of only 39.58% with the original design.To improve the material utilization, the part was redesigned into two pieces as shown in Fig 2, which can be welded together to form the original design. This redesign improved the material utilization to 75.03%. Though material utilization couldn't be improved further due to design limitations, redesign helped to generate 273 pairs of redesigned model compared to 144 numbers of original models from the same sheet size. Welding is an additional process introduced by redesign but it was found that cost of material saving is greater than the additional welding and cutting costs.Visit Nestlib page for more details.

Redesign your components for cost reduction

A work table design modeled as shown below ended up with a nested layout involving lot of scrap.

Original design

Nested layout of the original design

By suitably redesigning the work table as shown below, part utilization increased from 4 part nesting to 6 part nesting in the same sheet and scrap is avoided.

Redesigned Part

Nested layout of the redesigned part

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