Hello all,

In this post I wanted to explain a way to manage single parts that flex/distort when installed. Each use case might need a different final shape for the geometry. Obvious examples are springs, clips and O-rings.

The "Deformability" functionality introduced in R2024x allows to manage easily a deformable component in context of a 3D product definition and Bill of Material. 

You have 3 possible ways to proceed:

1/ Manually set a component as Deformed using the Product Mechanical Behavior command. You will have to manually select the Deformable component it's coming from.

2/ Create a generic Deformable component including a Design Table and generate a Component Family from it. All generated family items will be automatically set as Deformed.

3/ Create an Engineering Template that is set as Deformable. Each component resulting from the Engineering Template instantiation will be automatically set as Deformed.

You can only use a Component Family when you are able to predict the possible future use-cases and include enough variants of a parameter to cover all possibilities. Obviously, when dealing with flexible parts like springs, a user won't be able to predict all the installed cases in advance. Therefore, Component Family is not what we need. The solution is to use Engineering Templates set as Deformable.

You can see an example in attached video where I show the usage of the Engineering Template and the EBOM result in the drawing. The springs quantity would also be correct in the EBOM generated in the Engineering Release ENOVIA widget.