The distance and band analysis is a great function to measure the minimum distance or to see if your product is meeting a minimum and maximum distance requirement. The icon is located in the Space Analysis Workbench in the Space Analysis toolbar as shown in Figure 1-1:
After selecting the icon, the dialog box appears. CATIA gives the analysis a generic name. You can rename it something more specific as shown below:
Use the Type pull down menu to determine what type of analysis you want to perform. Here are the options:
Minimum: allows you to analyze the minimum distance between components in any direction
Along X: allows you to analyze the minimum distance between components in the X direction
Along Y: allows you to analyze the minimum distance between components in the Y direction
Along Z: allows you to analyze the minimum distance between components in the Z direction
Band Analysis: This allows you to set a minimum and maximum distance that the components have to meet. If you see red, this means that the components have violated the minimum distance. Green means that it’s the area that is between the minimum and maximum distance.
Next it’s time to choose the components that need to be analyzed. Here are the options:
Inside one selection: This will allow the user to make one grouping. The grouped components are the only ones analyzed in this process.
Between two selections: This will allow the user to make two groups. Components between the groups will be analyzed for the distance.
Selection against all: This will look for the minimum distance between all the components in the assembly.
Figure 1-3 shows the location in the dialog box where the components can be selected to make up the groups:
When you choose to perform a band analysis, you will need to add in the minimum and maximum distance in the specified fields in the dialog box as shown in Figure 1-4:
In the lower left hand corner is an Accuracy field. By default the value is set to 5mm. This can easily be changed. The smaller the value that’s entered the more accurate the result is, however, the longer CATIA will need to process the results.
When performing any analysis usually you will want to select Apply after filling out the top of the dialog box as shown in Figure 1-5. This will run your results and show them to you in the dialog box. If you click Ok, this will run your results but close the dialog box so that it stores in your specification tree. If you wanted to review the results you would have to double click on the analysis from the tree.
Figure 1-6 shows the product in which we will perform a Band Analysis on. Our design intent was to have the ball be between 215mm to 225mm away from the T-Support.
Figure 1-7 is showing how the dialog box is set up for this example. We used the Band Analysis option along with ‘Between two selections.’ This allowed us to select the ball part file (Selection 1) and the T-Support part file (Selection 2).
Now that the dialog box is set up we will click Apply. Figure 1-8 shows the results. A preview window appears along with the distance results in the dialog box.
The area in red is showing what is validating the minimum distance criteria and the area in green is what’s between the minimum and maximum value that was typed into the dialog box. As you can see, our distance is 207mm so we are missing our design intent.
The dialog box will give you the actual measured distance and in what direction it was taken in. It also gives coordinate values of the two points in which it is measuring as shown in Figure 1-9:
Once you click ok to the dialog box, the coloring does stay on your models. The analysis is also stored in the tree. You can see that the bottom of the dialog box does have some options for making the color transparent so it’s not so bold or you can hide the coloring all together.
Accuracy- notice when we zoom into the T-Support as shown in Figure 1-10; the coloring is very jagged. This has to do with accuracy. This first results was ran with the accuracy set to 5mm.
Now let’s run the same analysis but this time set the accuracy to 1mm. The result is shown in Figure 1-11.
As you can see the result is a lot more accurate and smoother.
After closing the results from our band analysis, the analysis is stored in our specification tree as shown in Figure 1-12:
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