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Electrical Routing
Published in Godfrey C. Onwubolu, Introduction to SOLIDWORKS, 2017
When designing wiring systems, the preferred approach is to model the wiring as a wiring harness. A cable harness, also known as a wire harness, cable assembly, wiring assembly or wiring loom, is a string of cables and/or wires that are used to design wiring systems. This method has many advantages over modeling wires and cables individually. It allows SolidWorks to make many calculations for the user and greatly reduces errors. There are two ways to model a wiring harness. Electrical routing with clipsThe easiest way to model a harness is to use clips. You can place clips as required in the assembly. The harness is then routed through the clips.Using a from–to listA from–to list automates much of the wiring process. It contains each of the wires and cables in the design and identifies the wire type to use and the required connectivity. Using a from–to list eliminates the need to enter wiring data manually, makes the design process easier, and improves the accuracy of electrical routes.
A method for the cost optimization of industrial electrical routings
Published in Computer-Aided Design and Applications, 2018
Vincenzo Castorani, Paolo Cicconi, Marco Mandolini, Alessio Vita, Michele Germani
The paper presents a cost optimization method for the design of electrical cable harness, based on the analytic cost analysis of the raw material and cable routing. The inputs of such a method are the cables list and the layout of the plant. The method presented in this paper, even if focused on electrical cabling, can be also extended to other arrangements such as piping. The method, once implemented within a prototypal software tool, has been applied for the cost optimization of the cable routing of an on-shore module for power generation. Thanks to the use of this methodology, considering the portion of the electrical system analyzed in section 3, it was possible to save up to 15% of electrical cable routing cost. The proposed methodology has been iterated on other portions of the electrical system, achieving an average overall cost reduction of about 10%. However, the layout modification is limited only to the position of the branching points and thus it is not possible get an overall change of the layout (only sub-optimal solutions can be achieved). For this reason, future works will address the development of effective and time-efficient algorithms exploring a wider range of solutions. The cost estimation models require a further refinement for reducing the cost estimation error (improvement of the material waste calculation and the variability of the installation phase). Moreover, in order to give a general validation to the proposed approach, it is necessary to test the method on products other than that presented in this paper (e.g. auxiliary facilities of production plants).