Solid Edge ST4 Delivers New Tools to Help Machine Designers and Engineers Develop Better Products Faster

Enhancements to Siemens PLM Software’s Latest Release of Solid Edge Enable Better Product Design, Improved Multi-CAD Collaboration, Faster Sheet Metal Design Validation and Reduced Documentation Costs.

Siemens PLM Software has announced Solid Edge® software ST4 (Solid Edge ST4) aimed at helping machine designers and engineers develop better products faster. 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.

“Solid Edge ST4 helps the machine designer and engineer create better designs by making its ground breaking synchronous technology easier than ever to incorporate into everyday tasks, and by making its core modeling tools easier and more productive to use,” said Dan Staples, director of Solid Edge product development, Siemens PLM Software. “By delivering new ways to leverage synchronous technology, Solid Edge ST4 allows the user to work in whatever design environment best suits their needs, enabling them to stay focused on their design tasks without thinking about their design software. As a result, Solid Edge ST4 simplifies product design while offering one of the industry’s most powerful modeling systems for the advanced designer.”
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.

“As machine designers we are always working with very large assemblies so BEUMER is quite impressed with Solid Edge ST4 and the enhanced productivity it offers in the assembly environment,” said Volker Horstmann, mechanical engineer, BEUMER Maschinenfabrik GmbH & Co. KG, a Germany-based international leader in the manufacture of intra-logistics for conveying, loading, palletising, packaging, sorting and distribution technology. “Using new commands based on synchronous technology allows us to edit a 3D model directly in the context of an assembly without the need to work with 2D sketches, making product design much faster. We can now control the design work much better, see the results instantly and accept, edit or reject the solution immediately. Solid Edge ST4 provides more design flexibility and is more intuitive than ever.”
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.

“We use every aspect of Solid Edge and find we can’t live without it,” said Vladimir Kolar, Chief of Design and Development at Linet spol. S.r.o., a designer of medical beds and furniture based in the Czech Republic. “Many of the parts we create are very complicated plastic parts that couldn’t be effectively designed without 3D. Yet with Solid Edge our parts always fit, and we have virtually eliminated shop floor errors. As a long time Solid Edge customer, I am impressed with the way Siemens PLM Software listens to its customers and uses what they learn to enhance their offerings. The collective enhancements they have made in Solid Edge ST4 should have a big impact.”
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.

“I am very impressed with what I have seen in Solid Edge ST4; especially the enhancements to the drafting capability,” said Jan Bos, Engineering Manager for Geha BV, a manufacturer of large scale heat exchanger components in the Netherlands. “Our experience using Solid Edge has convinced us that Siemens PLM Software has created the best CAD solution in the industry. Using Solid Edge has doubled the design productivity of our staff while producing higher quality products with less rework.”
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.

Solid Edge ST4 is expected to be available in the third quarter of this year. For more information including a Solid Edge ST4 overview video featuring Dan Staples, in-depth product demonstrations, a “What’s New” fact sheet and more, please visit www.siemens.com/plm/st4.