Change Log

Version 2.0.1

Date released: not yet released

New features

• Parametric drawing tools on the Layers table's right-click menu, which draw a complete part of a transfer from a few dimensions:
  • Draw Belt – a troughed conveyor belt run, with 3-roll or 4-roll idlers and transitions. See Draw Belt.
  • Draw Curved Impact Plate, with a choice of plate types. See Draw Curved Impact Plate.
  • Draw Discharge Head Box. See Draw Discharge Head Box.
  • Draw Rock Box – a ledge on the head box's front wall that catches the discharge so material heaps on it and cushions the impact. Fits itself to a drawn head box, with side panels and wear plates, an optional narrower plate and an angled lip that turns the stream. See Draw Rock Box.
  • Draw Lower Chute, from the head box down to the receiving belt, including a surge bar at the bottom opening. See Draw Lower Chute.
  • Draw Loading Boot – the enclosure between the lower chute and the receiving belt: an elbow, a loading plate, side panels standing on the belt's wings, and a boot toe with a sloping or level lid. See Draw Loading Boot.
  • Draw Skirts – a pair of skirt boards along a belt, following its slope and transitions. See Draw Skirts.
• Draw Discharge Trajectory: draws the path of the material leaving the head pulley in the 3D view, from the belt line and from the top of the material, using CEMA's method as Helix DeltaT does. Allows for the belt sag before the pulley, from the belt tension or a sag percentage, and is saved with the project. See Draw Discharge Trajectory.
• New layer tools on the Chute Faces tab: Rotate Layer, Copy and Scale Layer, Merge Selected Layers, Move Face to New Layer, and dragging layers up and down the Layers table to reorder them. See Rotate Layer, Copy and Scale Layer, Merge Layers and Reorder Layers.
• Triangulate Face on the Faces table's right-click menu, to split a warped four-sided face into two flat triangles. See Triangulate Face.
• Swap Face Winding Direction on the Faces table's right-click menu, and Make Face Winding Uniform on the Layers table's, which turns a whole layer's faces the same way as their neighbours in one step. See Add/Edit Layers, Faces, Vertices.
• Clicking a row in the Vertices table marks that vertex in the 3D view with a small magenta X and outlines its face. See Add/Edit Layers, Faces, Vertices.
• Transparent display mode, for a see-through view of the chute, and Zoom Extents, which reframes the view to fit the whole model. See Drawing Settings.
• Copy Image and Save Image: copy or save images of the 3D view, up to four times the window size, for reports. See Drawing Settings.
• A licence watermark – Licensed to your company, or Evaluation Only – on copied and saved images and the first five seconds of a recorded video. See Drawing Settings.
• Particle-to-particle cohesion, for wet and sticky material. See Simulating Wet/Sticky Material (Cohesion).
• Particle-to-particle damping using the Coefficient of Restitution. See Particle - Particle Damping.
• Compare Recordings: measures several recorded runs and reports how they differ. See Compare Recordings.
• Export Data to Excel on the Recorded Data tab. See Calculation Reports.
• A Settings tab for program-wide preferences, such as switching off the confirmation before removing a face. See Add/Edit Layers, Faces, Vertices.
• Help: a keyword search box, a ? button on every tab and dialog that opens its Help topic beside the contents, the current topic highlighted in the contents, an image slideshow on the Overview page, and a new Pricing page.

Improvements

• The drawing tools now create every face facing the right way (anticlockwise vertex order), and imported triangles have exactly three vertices.
• The Draw dialogs remember the inputs you last used, and show a letter beside each dimension that matches a dimension drawing on its Help page. Drawing into an existing layer asks whether to replace its faces (keeping the layer's friction, belt velocity and colour) or add to them.
• Draw Belt: the Approach Angle input is replaced by Transition Offset, for an elevated pulley transition. Draw the belt level and use Rotate Layer for an inclined run. See Draw Belt.
• The Draw Discharge Head Box and Draw Lower Chute dialogs can be resized.
• Record Video suggests a file named after the project.
• The main window keeps a minimum width, so the last tabs can't be pushed off its right edge.
• The colour values in the Layers table can be edited directly.
• A colour picker for the Drawing tab's Background Colour.
• After Load Recording, the Recorded Data tab opens automatically.
• Long tooltips wrap into a compact block and appear just below their input box, inside the tab.
• The Drawing tab's Z Position now moves the model along its own Z axis. See Drawing Settings.
• Lower default friction and restitution for head box and chute layers.

Fixes

• Particles no longer leak through the internal seam of a warped chute panel.
• The lower chute no longer twists or crosses over itself on 90 degree transfers.
• The surge bar now raises the correct edge of the bottom opening.
• Editing a feed box during a calculation (even typing in its Material Description) no longer releases a burst of extra particles. A box switched off and on again resumes feeding without catching up.

Removed

• The live particle trace (Trace # / Show Trace). Use Trace a Single Particle on a recording instead.