1. history
catia was first developed in 1977 for internal use by the French aircraft manufacturer dassault Aviation, at that time user of the software cadam[1][2].
initially called cati (conception assistée tridimensionnelle interactive, in Italian assisted interactive three-dimensional design) was renamed caia in 1981 when dassault created a subsidiary to develop and sell the software and signed a non-exclusive distribution agreement with ibm[3].
in 1984, boeing chose cad 3d as its main software, becoming the largest purchaser.
In 1988, Catia 3 was transferred from mainframes to the unix platform.
in 1990, the general dynamics electric boat chose catia as software for designing virginia class submarines.
in 1992, cadam was purchased by ibm and the following year was released cadam v4.
in 1996 four operating systems supported it: ibm aix, silicone graphics irix, sun microsystems sunos and hewlett-packard hp-ux.
in 1998 was released catia v5, a version completely rewritten and supported by unix, windows nt and since 2001 windows xp.
in 2008, dassault announced catia v6[4] supported only by windows[5], while the other versions will be maintained by the various business partners, so much so that we speak insistently of a future porting on linux and bsd.
2. characteristics
commonly referred to as a three-dimensional product lifecycle management software, catia is able to support numerous stages of product life, from creation, design (cad), production(cam), analysis (cae).
catia can be customized through bees. catia v4 can be customized through fortran languages and c, using a bees called caa. catia v5 can be customized via visual basic and c++ languages, using a bee called caa2 or caa v5, a com-type interface.
catia v4 mainly uses polynomial surfaces, with a "non-manifold solid" engine. later versions instead implement nurbs.
catia v5 leans on a geometric kernel including a parametric modeler of surfaces and solids (parametric feature based modeler). This uses nurbs curves as the main internal representation of surfaces.
catia v5 is a highly scalable system therefore can be equipped with other applications or modules including all tools normally available for this range of plm systems such as, for example, pdm platforms (including enovia and smarteam), cae environments for finite element analysis, routine cam for the definition and calculation of tool paths, etc.
3. supported software platforms and operating systems
catia v6 turns exclusively on microsoft windows.
catia v5 can turn on microsoft windows (both 32-bit and 64-bit), as well as on the release 18 service pack 4 of windows view 64[6].
the unix ibm aix, hewlett packard hp-ux and sun microsystemssolas are also supported. [7]catia v4 can work on some unix systems, on windows nt 4 and on windows 2000 [8]and from mainframe platforms ibm mvs and vm/cms, the latter up to version 1.7.
catia v3 and previous, turn on ibm mainframe platforms.
4. famous industries using catia
This system is widely used in the engineering industry, especially in automotive and aerospace sectors for which caia, pro/engineer and nx (previously unigraphics) are dominant systems.
4. 1. aerospace industry
boeing used catia v3 to develop its 777 line aircraft, and is currently using catia v5 for its 787 series of aircraft. Moreover they have used the entire series of 3d plm products of the dassault systemes, including catia, delmia, and enovia lca, in addition to applications developed internally by boeing. [9]the European aerospace giant airbus has used caia since 2001.[10]bombier aerospace, Canadian aircraft manufacturer, has realized all its technical developments on catia.[11]4. 2. automotive industry
car companies, using caia at various levels, are bmw, porsche, daimler chrysler,[12], audi, [13]volkswagen, volvo, fiat, gestamp automocion, benteler ag, psa peugeot citroën, renault, toyota, honda, ford, scania, hyundai, škoda auto, proton, tata motors and mahindra. goodyear uses catia to design tyres for automotive and aerospace sectors, and also uses a custom catia version for development and design phases. all automobile companies use catia for the design of the various structures of which the car is composed, for example the doors ( hinges, cinematics of the opening), supports, bumpers, rear and front lamps and roof, sides and supporting structures, as this software is very valid for the aesthetic and visual creation of the surfaces and the consequent numerical representation on the computer.
4. 3. shipbuilding
the dassault systems has begun to provide its software to shipbuilders with catia v5 release 8, which includes some special characteristics suitable for shipbuilding. gd electric boat used catia to design its last class of submarines for rapid attack, called virginia and supplied to the military navy of the use. [14]. northrop grumman newport news has also used caia to design the aircraft carriers class gerald r. ford, always for the military navy of the use.[15]4. 4. Other
architect frank gehry used the software, on behalf of c-cubed virtual architecture (now virtual build team), to design its curvilinear buildings, which were the subject of awards[16]. the technological company that to him, gehry technologies, has developed a software, based on catia, called digital project[17]. The latter was used to design buildings and allowed a limited number of complete projects to be completed. it should be said that the modeling of free form applied to architectural structures has been the object of criticism because it is necessary to use much more material bearing than normal, in addition to sometimes losing the primary features for which the building has been realized[18].
5. latest implementations
the dassault systemes released catia version 6 (v6) in mid-2008.[19] the new interface allows designers to directly manipulate the three-dimensional solid models, rather than follow the approach used in v5 catia based on the concept of "feature".
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