Sigmund ABA for Solid Edge is an assembly build analysis tool that, for parts and assemblies defined in Solid Edge, allows engineers to evaluate the 3-D effects of component tolerances on the quality of manufactured products. Sigmund provides engineers with an easy to use Solid Edge-Sigmund interface to evaluate the capability of their Solid Edge designs, ensuring that assemblies go together 100 percent of the time, while meeting all the assembly performance criteria. Sigmund ABA is integrated with Solid Edge v12 and above.

Sigmund ABA for SolidEdge can be used to resolve complex assembly problems for rigid bodies, evaluate design improvements, identify important design characteristics and determine optimal tolerances for parts and assemblies created in Solid Edge. Using Sigmund from design concept through production will improve quality, reduce costs, and cut development cycle times.

Development of a Sigmund assembly build analysis model follows an intuitive, step-by-step methodology that includes the following stages:

• Component Geometry Creation: Model geometry can be exported from Solid Edge as a Solid Edge Part/Assembly data (wire frame or surface) or IGES, STEP data (wire frame or surface). The entities that can be exported to Sigmund are: CAD geometry (wire frame or surface), planes, lines, points, axis, and coordinate systems.
• GD&T or Tolerance Emulation: This step defines the component variation to be modeled. Solid Edge input tolerance information including the component GD&T datum structures and geometric tolerances must be reapplied to the relevant features using the functionality provided in Sigmund. Simple, menu-driven commands are used to define the datum reference frames, and tolerance feature control frames are simply filled as shown on the drawing. The capability also exists to emulate dimensional or tolerances if GD&T has not been used.
• Optimize: Using the output from the Sigmund model, the Solid Edge design can be evaluated, optimized and validated before a single part is manufactured. At this stage, different design concepts, locating schemes and assembly methods can be evaluated. Potential manufacturing processes and the resulting capabilities can be assessed. Tolerances can be tightened, if necessary, to meet the requirements or loosened if they are found to have little impact on the requirements.