A CADDEX tool for CAD and CAE integration

In recent years, the CAD-simulation integration becomes more than important in the design of complex mechanical products. In CAD environment, the simulation incorporates not only the FEM simulation, but also the simulation of assembly and disassembly plans, tolerancing, etc. The mock-up of mechatronic products made by CAD systems must respond to the requirements given by the system engineer. This loop, when automated, ensures the interoperability between different systems of an industrial product. However, in reality, there is a lack of continuity between the CAD designer and the system engineer. Some CAD data are needed to be transferred to Computer Aided Engineering applications (CAE) such as: part’s data (mass, volume, inertia matrix, center of mass coordinates…) and the assembly data (assembly constraint, assembly matrices, dynamic collision, etc.). In this paper, a FreeCAD Workbench application is developed and implemented as an open-source tool. The main objective is to question the CAD system in order to extract relevant data and export them under a standard format. The SysML graphic formalism is used to develop the proposed tool, named CADDEX©. Using the implemented tool, the collected data parts are exported as an XML format which is used by the system engineering (SE). An illustrative example is used to highlight the advantages and limitations of the proposed tool.