Wall Thickness Analyzer Example

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Implementation
• Example output
• Files

Demonstrates how to compute minimum and maximum wall thickness of a 3D model and print the result in a console.

Overview

In this example demonstrates how to compute minimum and maximum wall thickness of a 3D model using wall thickness analysis tool (WallThickness_Analyzer). For this purpose, used a console application that imports a model. Wall thickness analysis will be performed for each unique ModelData::Part , but only for the scope of accepted geometries.

Application needs 1 or 2 input arguments to run:

Usage: wall_thickness_analyzer <input_file> <input_resolution>, where:
    <input_file> is a name of the file to be read
    <input_resolution> is an optional argument that determine accuracy of wall thickness calculation. The larger the value, the higher the accuracy of the calculations, but greatly increase computation time and memory usage. Should be at least 20.

For more information about wall thickness visit Wall Thickness Calculation page.

Implementation

To explore the model and process ModelData::Part , it's need to create an inheritor from the ModelData::ModelElementVoidVisitor and override the part processing method void operator() (const ModelData::Part& thePart). For this purpose, the SolidProcessor and PartProcessor classes were created. In operator() method a ModelData::Part is examined for the presence of ModelData::Solid shapes in it.

using namespace cadex;
 
void operator() (const ModelData::Part& thePart) override
{
    auto aPartName = thePart.Name().IsEmpty() ? "noname" : thePart.Name();
 
    size_t aBodyNumber = 0;
    const auto& aBodies = thePart.Bodies();
    for (const auto& aBody : aBodies) {
        ModelData::ShapeIterator aShapeIt (aBody);
        while (aShapeIt.HasNext()) {
            const auto& aShape = aShapeIt.Next();
            if (aShape.Type() == ModelData::ShapeType::Solid) {
                cout << "Part #" << myPartIndex << " [\"" << aPartName << "\"] - solid #" << std::to_string (aBodyNumber++) << " has:" << endl;
                ProcessSolid (ModelData::Solid::Cast (aShape));
            }
        }
    }
 
    ++myPartIndex;
}

ProcessSolid method is used to run wall thickness analysis for given entities.

using namespace cadex;
 
void ProcessSolid (const ModelData::Solid& theSolid) override
{
    auto aWTData = myAnalyzer.Perform (theSolid, myResolution);
    PrintWTData (aWTData);
}

PrintWTData method is used to retrieve minimum and maximum thickness from computed WallThickness_Data and print these values to console.

using namespace cadex;
 
void PrintWTData (const WallThickness_Data& theData)
{
    if (!theData.IsEmpty()) {
        cout << "    Min thickness = " << theData.MinThickness() << " mm" << endl;
        cout << "    Max thickness = " << theData.MaxThickness() << " mm\n" << endl;
    } else {
        cerr << "    Failed to analyze the wall thickness of this entity.\n";
    }
}

To traverse only unique parts of the imported model, the ModelData::ModelElementUniqueVisitor class is used.

using namespace cadex;
 
PartProcessor aPartProcessor;
ModelData::ModelElementUniqueVisitor aVisitor (aPartProcessor);
aModel.Accept (aVisitor);

Example output

Below is the example output for model from ./examples/models/barrel.stp and resolution set to 1000.

Model	Example output
	Model: barrel Part #0 ["barrel"] - solid #0 has: Min thickness = 4.526479 mm Max thickness = 10.036917 mm

Files

• C++: ./examples/cxx/wall_thickness/analyzer/main.cxx
• C#: ./examples/csharp/wall_thickness/analyzer/Program.cs
• Java: ./examples/java/wall_thickness/analyzer/analyzer.java
• Python: ./examples/python/wall_thickness/analyzer/analyzer.py