There is an interesting news regarding CATIA to be shared by composites user community. While almost all the composites related functionalities such as composites design by zones/plies, ply drop offs, core sampling, ply producibility, ply flattening, ply cut outs, lay-up export etc. have been existing as native CATIA offerings in composites workbenches, one valuable piece has been missing. That piece is called Laser Projection, a tool that can assist manufacturing guys in placing cut plies at right location on the tool. Earlier this functionality was offered through one of Dassault Systemes software partner called Majestic. However, Majestic got acquired by Autodesk a while ago so Dassault Systemes decided to develop a similar functionality in-house.

Laser Projection functionality was introduced in V5-6R 2016 release of CATIA, both in classic as well as in Express configurations and has been refined in service packs such as V5-6R 2016 SP2 and SP3. In classic configuration license is named as CLA and in express configuration license is named as LPX. Either CATIA composites design or manufacturing workbenches are a pre-requisite in either of these configurations. This technology is most suitable for most hand-layup parts such as panels, hulls, wind blades etc.

Within the application, it is possible to define any number of lasers by coordinates and assign properties to them such as its dimensions and range in terms of distance, horizontal and vertical angles. It is also possible to optimize the resource allocation. The reach envelope can be visualized to make sure largest ply in the model can be displayed with given number of lasers in the model. If not, more lasers can be defined or their positions can be changed.

The Laser Projection module is compatible with most commercial available vendor machines such as Virtek, LAP, LPT etc. The core thickness as well as plies thickness is automatically taken into account during projection. It is also possible to change display properties such as laser color, length of normal vectors etc. It is further possible to include additional geometry or text as a part of the display from predefined CATIA sets.

For any further information regarding licensing or functionality of this module, including a demonstration, please approach us and we are ready to help. It is also possible to import the laser projection files such as .py and .cal extensions to review the laser projections data in CATIA laser projection.