Surface Treatment Routing
Surface Treatment is a secondary process group--its processes are applied in conjunction with or subsequent to the primary manufacturing processes that are used to manufacture a part. As such, they are not available for selection when indicating the primary process group (for example, in the Production Info window or in the Select Primary Process Group window). Instead, you can edit the process routing to include one or more Surface Treatment processes. All Surface Treatment processes are optional and by default they are not assigned automatically by aPriori, so you must explicitly include the processes of interest.
Follow these steps to include a Surface Treatment process in a routing:
1 In the Manufacturing Process pane, click the Edit menu and choose Routing Selection…
2 The Routing Selection window will appear. The last node of each routing is a Surface Treatment node. For the routing level of interest, click the + symbol to expand the Surface Treatment node into four intermediate nodes representing different types of Surface Treatment (Shot Blast, Painting Processes, Electroplating, and Labelling).
3 Click the + symbol on each intermediate node to expand it into distinct surface treatment processes. For example, the Painting Processes node expands into three distinct painting processes: a Wet Coat Line, a Powder Coat cart-based process, and a generalized Painting process that can be used to represent any painting process based on cost per surface area.
4 To include a specific surface treatment process in a routing, right-click on the process node and select Include from the popup menu. You can include multiple surface treatment processes as appropriate (for example, you may wish to select both Painting and Screen Printing for a given part).
Note You must include the lowest-level process node or component-level operation node. If you include only an intermediate node (such as Painting Processes), aPriori does not automatically include the processes under it.
5 To remove a surface treatment process from a routing, right-click on the process node and select Exclude or Let aPriori Decide from the popup menu.
Surface treatment processes include the following:
• Blast processes:
• Shot Peen process
• Degrease process
• Mask-Bench process
• Anodize process (see Anodize Routing)
• Vibratory Finishing process (models tumble deburr; surface finishing to be added in a future release)
• Manual Paint: models the application of a specified number of coats of primer and a specified number of finish coats. Each primer or finish coat is preceeded by hand sanding and hand cleaning, and is followed by curing. Any holes are masked by the Mask-Bench process. See also Manual Paint Inputs.
• Paint processes:
• Electroplate processes:
• Label process:
• Passivation process
Anodize Routing
Anodizing is an electrochemical process that converts the metal surface of a part into a decorative, durable, corrosion-resistant, anodic oxide finish. aPriori’s anodizing cost model supports aluminum parts, and uses one process, Anodize, which has several component-level child operations. The child operations are divided into three groups: Pre-treatment operations, Anodizing operations, and Post-treatment operations:
The pre-treatment operations include the following:
• Clean: removes any grease or dirt from the surface.
• Etch: removes some of the aluminum material from the top surface.
• Deoxidize: removes surface oxides.
• Rinse: the part is rinsed multiple times during pre-treatment.
The Anodizing operations include the following:
• One of the following:
o Anodize Type I: chromic acid anodizing
o Anodize Type IB: low voltage, chromic acid anodizing
o Anodize Type IC: non-chromic anodizing
o Anodize Type II: sulfuric acid anodizing
o Anodize Type III: hard anodic coatings (possibly sulfuric acid)
This is the main stage of the process, during which the part is dipped in the acid bath to form the oxide film.
Note that type IIB anodizing is also supported—see below.
• Rinse
• Spray Rinse
The post-treatment operations include the following:
• Seal (optional): closes the pores on the part. This is included by default, but users can override the default on a part-by-part basis with the setup option Enable Sealing Operation. Typically, if parts are painted, they are not sealed.
• Dry
When you add Anodizing to your routing, be sure to specify which Anodizing operation you want to include:
To estimate the cost of type IIB anodizing, select Anodize Type II, and use the setup option Specify Anodize Coating Thickness to set the layer thickness to the desired value, which typically is between 0.00635mm and 0.01016mm (0.0004 inch and 0.00025 inch).
Anodizing is optionally preceded by the Mask-Bench process, in order to model the process of masking portions of the part that should not be anodized. If you want to model any masking, manually include the Mask-Bench process in your routing. Once the process is included, you can manually assign individual features to the Masking operation:
In addition, threaded holes and threaded curved walls are automatically assigned feature masking.