Five Helpful Tips for Using Volume Helical Sweep in Creo

Nobody wants to sweat under the spotlight and explain why an inaccurate helical sweep caused downstream production problems. It wasn’t entirely your fault. You had to rely on 2D approximations because accurate 3D modeling wasn’t available.

No more. With the Volume Helical Sweep tool in Creo, you can more accurately model geometry and the cutting tools that will interact with it.

Version: Creo 5.0

Extensions: No extension needed.

Five Helpful Tips for Using Volume Helical Sweep in Creo

1. Use the tool for scenarios in which a sweep of a 3D cutting tool is performed along a helical curve. Think: a screw conveyor or a grinding wheel.

    

Screw conveyor modeled using the Volume Helical Sweep tool in Creo.

2. Volume Helical Sweep can only remove material. You cannot sweep a volume to add material, but you can use the unattached preview to get a visual representation of the resulting envelope which is then cut away from the part
3. Most of your work will take place from the dashboard found at Sweep > Volume Helical Sweep.
4. From the dashboard, you can define and control the parameters of the helical trajectory. This is always your first step. Turn on the display of the helix and 3D object to see it in the graphics
5. From the dashboard, you can also select, create, or edit a 2D section that defines the cutting tool, and control available dimensions. Note that you can also adjust the angle to control the orientation of the 3D cutting tool.

In the Volume Helical Sweep dashboard, you can drag a visualization of the 3D cutting tool along the sweep trajectory to easily visualize its movement and orientation.

To see more of what Volume Helical Sweep can do, watch the video below.

Pro Tips

• PTC Partner EAC has created an excellent explainer video you can view here.
• Use absolute accuracy (values between 0.01 mm and 0.001 mm) for projects where the success of the geometric operation depends on part accuracy.
• Any section defining the cutting tool may only contain lines and arcs that form convex shapes and must contain a line along the axis of revolution of the cutting tool.

Try Creo Free

You can try out many of these features with your own designs today. Download the 30-day free trial. Available now!