Swiss company successfully uses existing 3D CAD data for technical documentation, and thus realises a considerable savings potential
Metrohm is a leading supplier for ion analysis.
In Herisau, Switzerland, it develops and produces instruments for analysis techniques such as titration, ion chromatography, voltammetry, and ion measurement.
High demands on the reliability and usability of Metrohm instruments also include high demands on product documentation.
The Teachware department at Metrohm creates instruction manuals that help the user handle the instruments correctly.
In this context, technical illustration plays a significant role.
Previously, those illustrations had been newly created with the help of common 2D graphics software. In this process, existing 2D or 3D design data could only be implemented at a limited basis, if at all.
The wish for a simpler and faster method for the re-use of 3D design data and their conversion into perspective 2D illustrations led to the acquisition of Itedo's software IsoDraw and IsoDraw CadProcess two years ago.
The employment of CadProcess was meant to save them from the extensive effort of drawing complex instrument views totally anew.
After all, it had been hard to accept that the existing data of the instruments and the mountings, which had already been completely drawn in 3D, could not be used for documentation.
"CadProcess allows us to import 3D design data directly via the IGES format.
This possibility saves us a lot of time.
Apart from that, we are now able to create much more detailed illustrations, which we could not realise in the past because of the extensive effort," reports Ulrich Pinkernell of Metrohm.
A typical example is the illustration of the Titrando, Metrohm's latest development of an automatic titration system.
This has just been presented successfully at various international trade shows (eg Pittcon 2002 in New Orleans, USA, and Analytica 2002 in Munich, Germany). One version of this instrument consists of a measuring and control unit on which the so-called exchange unit is placed. Apart from the reagent bottle and diverse tube connections, the latter also contains a dosing cylinder of a specific volume.
It would be an enormous effort to draw this instrument manually, due to the high number of small parts that are needed for the various views of the illustration.
Since the 3D data of all parts are available in Solid Designer, they can be exported to IGES.
This data is then converted into 2D illustrations with IsoDraw 5 CadProcess.
Some minor editing and optimisation of the illustrations is occasionally necessary.
For example, curved surfaces or filleted corners sometimes need little corrections. However, these are the exact spots that would cause the most problems in manual drawing, anyway.
Furthermore, such an illustration can easily be amended by several newly drawn elements because it still contains the original dimensions.
In this context, the orientation of the main axes to a fixed but freely definable grid facilitates the drawing of new parts in the appropriate perspective.
Since Metrohm confines to few main perspectives, a free combination of single parts between various illustrations is possible.
Completed illustrations are exported to eps format and can then be integrated into common text processing systems (like Word).
"Overall, the implementation of IsoDraw 5 in connection with CadProcess greatly relieves our work load, which results in meaningful illustrations and allows a more effective allocation of resources," concludes Ulrich Pinkernell.
