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What's New 2021 - Curved Edge Flange

dateOctober 21, 2020

One of the strengths of SOLIDWORKS is to create sheet metal parts easily in the SOLIDWORKS interface using Sheet Metal module. A design engineer is able to create a sheet metal on the fly in his daily design routine, by leveraging sheet metal features such as Base Flange, Edge Flange, Miter Flange, etc. However, he may be facing hiccup if he needs to create an edge flange on curved edges.

When working with sheet metal parts, we have long been able to create an edge flange on curved edges but we were limited to only curved edges originating from planar faces. For curved edges on non-planar faces, we are not able to create edge-flange on them. In SOLIDWORKS 2020, we will not be able to select those curved edges to create edge flanges.

SOLIDWORKS 2020

Apparently, sometimes we really need to add an edge flange to those curved edges on a non-planar face. Especially in designing a bracket, we often need to add an edge flange there, just to provide additional stiffness to the bracket itself.

New in SOLIDWORKS 2021, we can finally add edge flange on non-planar faces! Below image shows how the edge flange is being created all the way around the part. Flange customization can also be done to this new flange, such as length, angle and flange position.

SOLIDWORKS 2021

And of course, this edge flange can also be flattened without any difficulty. We can create detailed drawings based on the flat pattern and export to DXF for fabrication.

Check out the video to see how we can create edge flanges on non-planar faces in SOLIDWORKS 2021.