The latest Solid Edge release includes a wide range of new customer-driven functionality including enhancements to synchronous technology to facilitate better product designs, improved multi-CAD collaboration using the widely adopted JT data format, new tools to accelerate sheet metal design validation, and further refinements to its world-class drafting capability to help reduce documentation costs.

Helping machine designers and engineers make better products faster
Solid Edge ST4 continues to add new capabilities to further enhance the intuitive design environment that helps machine designers and engineers design better products faster. Some examples include a new automated “live sections” capability to more easily and quickly create and edit revolved parts, new 3D modeling relationships to facilitate the centering, offsetting and editing of native or imported geometry, new 3D assembly relationships to automatically position parts in an assembly to avoid part interference, enhancements to the exploded views capability, and – through a new partnership with Cadenas GmbH – a new strategic parts management system that provides a dedicated portal for the configuration of 3D standard and supplier parts in native Solid Edge format.

Collaborate, simulate and document better
Many of the new features in Solid Edge ST4 are driven by Siemens PLM Software’s focus on understanding its customers’ requirements and responding directly to their needs to ensure each functional enhancement delivers real business value. By pursuing this customer-driven enhancement process, Solid Edge ST4 delivers business value by improving the user’s ability to collaborate with their customers and suppliers, and by streamlining everyday product development tasks like engineering drafting and sheet metal design.

Collaboration with JT and PDF
One of these enhancements deals with the need for companies to collaborate with suppliers, partners and customers who use multiple incompatible data formats from various computer-aided design (CAD) software applications. Solid Edge ST4 helps by working with Teamcenter software or Teamcenter Express software, the digital lifecycle management solutions from Siemens PLM Software, to fully leverage JT, the widely adopted lightweight 3D data format for accurately, securely and efficiently sharing product information. Solid Edge is the first CAD system in its category to leverage JT data in assemblies, providing fully associative updates from JT data content. And because JT has been widely adopted throughout the global manufacturing and PLM software industries, Solid Edge ST4 significantly reduces or eliminates data incompatibility to create a seamless collaboration environment.

Solid Edge ST4 further enhances collaboration with a new feature that enables parts and assemblies to be easily saved to 3D PDF files for viewing and sharing using Adobe Reader software. Product and manufacturing information (PMI), dimensions and annotations are included in the PDF document, together with a schematic of the assembly structure. This new format is ideal for communicating 3D product information and ideas to stakeholders throughout the product lifecycle.

World-class drafting
The developers of Solid Edge recognize drawings are an important deliverable for engineers, so Solid Edge ST4 continues to demonstrate leadership in this area with further enhancements to its world-class drafting capability that make product design documentation faster and easier. There are significant enhancements to the table customization feature, annotation and dimension control, creation of highly customized view captions, automatic view scaling on individual drawing sheets, and much more.

Sheet metal design validation
Solid Edge ST4 includes several enhancements to the highly regarded sheet metal capabilities in Solid Edge to improve computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulation and accelerate design validation. Sheet metal mid-surface creation is now available at the assembly level and a new capability to unite surface and solid bodies improves finite element mesh reliability across very complicated parts. New options to refine and control meshing, such as setting minimum element on an edge and max elements for small features, lets users increase detail resulting in more accurate results. Also, surfacing tools can be used for creating mid-surfaces of general thin parts, such as plastic parts, to speed results and increase solve reliability. These new features provide an easy to use method for optimizing a design and obtaining faster results on complicated models where sheet metal parts are included.