Context

When your 3D Piping  design is finished, you usualy want to regroup the components per pre-fabricated assemblies called "Spool" in piping or "Equiped tube" in tubing.

 From these spools you will generate drawings for fabrication and for installation

3DExperience CATIA Piping 3D Design App provide dedicated command to generate the spool manualy or automatily.

Create Spool

Spool modes

There are 2 types of spools

• Preliminary Spool
• Manufacturing Spool

You can generate one or the other and you can switch from preliminary to manufacturing mode afterward

• The advantage of the Preliminary Spool is that it doesn't reorganize the product structure so it facilitate the link management in case of modification. So you can stay in préliminary mode until you reach the project mile stone, before you have to release your data to generate the drawings.
• Lot of the customer are generating the spools at the latest stage and are directly generate Manufacturing spool without going through preliminary spool.

Manual spool generation

Automatic Spool generation

the automatic generation is based on a Spool rule table that must be defined in each piping Specification (it can be the same rule teble for all) and in which you describe the spliting conditions.

• Inside the spool
• border of spool
• outside the spool

these conditions can be set per couple Part subtype/endstyle

Create Spool in Batch mode

You can run the automatic spool generation in bach, to do that you must first have the Spool rule table well define into your piping Specifications.

Me Preference settings

A setting allows you to decide if system generate a Spool if it contains only one member

Line ID Link management and Spools

Following video explains how the links are done between 3D component and line ID.

this is important because the split of spool depends on the lineID organization 

Modify Spool

3D Master approach

It is possible to use "3D Tolerancing & Annotation" to add annotation and dimensions directly into the 3D spool for fabrication if we want to not use drawings.

the Annotation can be generate manualy or it can be automated using EKL Action. 

Following video shows the generation of  annotation using EKL

following video shows, how to review the annotated 3D spool inside CATIA Composer for people at shop floor. 

It is also possible to review it directly into 3DMarkup widjet

 video to come