dear all...

i am trying to sus out the method that i'll need to go through to accuratley and consistantly draw a gear profile that i can use with an FEA package. I have data in the form of x-y coordinates and have tried various methods of importing this into both mech desktop and inventor...

i am able to generate a polyline through the points by creating a dxf or lisp routine but this obviously produces a series of flat surfaces approximating the working surface of the gear tooth. This causes difficulties in meshing the model in FEA and correctrly constraining the gear - i'm trying to model a bending test on the tooth and need to match the loading conditions.

If i convert the polyline into a spline, its fine for looking at in 2D, but when i profile it for extrusion it reverts back to a series of segments.

I came across on sdotsons website a visual basic utility that allowed me to input the points from excel as a spline which was great except the spline didn't appear to be constrained and the points weren't always in the same place if i repeated the import.


thanks.
Dave