Dear All,
I have created an lofted part (Fig 1) and am trying to find the smallest cross sectional area available in that part? Is there any way/ feature available in solidworks that can do it, if not how is it possible to do?
As of now what i did was just eyeballed the area and then drawn a rough sketch (Fig 2) and plotted the area in the drawing.
Thanking you,
Kranthi.
Cross-sectional area will depend on the orientation of your intersection plane. It's like measuring a pin's diameter with a pair of calipers. If you don't hold the calipers just right, you'll end up with a value larger than the actual diameter. Other than trial and error, I don't know of a good way to define find the proper intersecting plane. It would be easier if you just cared about one dimension (width or heights). Then it would just be a simple measurement.One thing you can do is find the surface-to-surface minimum distance from top to bottom and left to right of the loft. For a loft that doesn't have too many inflection points, the minimum cross-section would probably be located somewhere in between where those two min distance measurements occurred.
Alternatively, if you can parameterize the location of the cross-section plane, you could use goal optimization to get the minimum area.