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Sheet Lightning is a combined parametric and 3D design CAD program for designing and unfolding the following products from sheet metal/material (Lite version
includes only parametric design).
Primary Product Design and Manufacture
1. Ducts and Flues
2. Chutes
3. Hoppers
4. Chimneys
5. Tubular steel products with tubular intersections.
The types of objects involved are:
1. Cylinders
2. Cones
3. Ovals
4. Rectangular sections
5. Adapters (all sections) - Square-to-round, Oval-to-rectangular etc.
6. Any oblique or skew.
Intersections can be:
1. Bends
2. Tees
3. Junctions/Cross-overs
Forming (for example):
1. Elbows
2. Swept/Segmented/Lobster-back bends
3. Divertors/Breeches
4. Tubular steel nodes
5. Feeders
6. Spiral chutes.
7. One-Off/Bespoke designs
Secondary Product Design and Manufacture
The program has also been used very effectively for designing and manufacturing many other sheet and tubular material designs and products. Such products include
exhaust manifolds, inflatable boats, inflatable bouncy castles, lamps shades and many similarly diverse products. Heavy engineering applications have included roof supports, tubular structural steel football stand
supports, massive hydro-electric power station flow divertor conduit, and other major design projects.
Sheet Lightning in Education
The program has proved to be a powerful and valuable educational tool for schools and colleges. The main
benefit for education is that the program is specifically aimed at the design of certain products. This means that as a CAD system it is far more productive (in its product area) than that of a general CAD system.
Secondly the designs created by Sheet Lightning can be physically created/manufactured using any sheet material, including the paper output directly to the printer. Students therefore have a unique
opportunity of connecting their 3D design work to the real world by using the program to create anything from very simple, to very creative and artistic 3D designs and then actually creating the physical design
using the printed output.
The 3D system in Sheet Lightning bears a close resemblance to many of the general 3D CAD systems on the market, but it simplifies 3D CAD in a way that is made possible by the
specific product area for which is developed. It also has the advantage of having a dual parametric/CAD design environment, which means that even before any CAD skills are developed students can get useful and
interesting output just by loading parametric design templates and typing in a few dimension values.
Sheet Lightning in Art
The most powerful specialism of Sheet Lightning is in its ability to create designs with complex intersections of many sheet material
objects. This ability has proved to offer huge artistic potential. Sheet Lightning has an inbuilt and automatic facility for rendering 3D designs into solids with rotation/orbiting facilities. These images alone can
be 'snapped' and used in presentations, but the 3D output can also be exported seamlessly to a CAD system and rendered with full control to produce some stunning images.
Special Product Design and CAD Application Development
Sheet Lightning has been
created using Revcad Software's RAD CAD technology (Rapid Application Development of Computer Aided Design). This technology allows for the rapid development of bespoke CAD applications for new and specific product
areas. The result being that Sheet Lightning has highly specific design capability for certain product areas that are either embedded in the main product, or released as entirely separate applications with just this
capability.
Further Information
Further information on the design capability of Sheet Lightning is available in the program help files. Obtain the program from the ‘Download’ page.
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