Published on: 02 June 2025
Ordering construction profiles in Sophia®
Following requests from numerous customers, as well as sheet metal, round and square and rectangular tubes, you can now also order profiles from us. In this Feature Friday, you can read which profiles are supported and see how to work with them in Sophia®.
Which profiles can you have customised?
The following profiles are available:
- H profiles (HEA and HEB)
- I profiles (IPE)
- U profiles (UPE and UNP)
- L profiles (angle profiles with equal and unequal legs)
- T profiles
You can see exactly which materials and dimensions are available in our overview of materials.
How to import a drawing with profiles into Sophia®
Start a new project and upload your 3D drawing. It doesn’t matter if the drawing contains one or more profiles, or even a complete assembly. Because recognising profiles is more complex, importing larger projects in particular can take a little longer than you are used to.
The image below shows how an assembly of one of our customers (VyTech) is shown in Sophia®.
Sophia® can recognise any profile, provided that:
- It is included in our range
- It has been drawn in accordance with the industry standard* or
- The part comes from the 247TailorSteel tubes library for SolidEdge (developed in partnership with Percall Group).
*L profiles must be drawn in accordance with EN 10056-1, H, I and U profiles in accordance with EN 10365 and T profiles in accordance with EN 10055.
If your preferred material is unavailable, please contact our Customer Service.
If Sophia® does not recognise the profile, a “Part not recognised” warning will be shown. This may mean we do not offer the profile, or that is has not been drawn in accordance with the industry standard. Check your drawing, make any necessary changes and upload it again in Sophia®.
After the file has been imported, you can select the desired (and available) metal for each profile. We can cut the following profile materials to size:
- Steel profiles
- Aluminium profiles
- Stainless steel profiles
Each part in the 3D view can be viewed individually. Once everything is in order, you can request a quote as normal.
Please note: Sophia® normally generates a quote in well under a minute. With profiles, this takes longer, because more processing power is required for the ‘open’ shape. You have three options:
- You can wait and leave the window open.
- After a minute, a pop-up with a checkbox will be shown while the quote is being generated. If you select it and click ‘Close’, you will receive an e-mail as soon as your quote is ready.
- You can close the window and check later whether your quote is ready. If so, you can find it under the ‘Quotes’ tab in your dashboard.
Important specification guidelines
In general, the same specification guidelines as those for tube laser cutting apply to profiles. There are a few specific guidelines for profiles, which you can read here.
The following points should also be taken into account:
❌ The feature in Sophia® that allows you to have the part name automatically engraved does not work for profiles. Marks and engravings for identification purposes that have been drawn beforehand in your file will however be engraved.
❌ 3D laser cutting of profiles is not possible. If your drawing requires 3D cutting of a profile, Sophia® will usually convert it to 2.5D. Ideally, you should draw everything in 2.5D yourself. You can read more about the differences between 3D and 2.5D laser cutting here.
❌ 3D laser cutting at profile is not possible
✅ 2.5D laser cutting at profile is possible
⚠ Deviations and tolerances for profiles are larger than for round, square and rectangular tubes. Although this isn’t usually a problem in practice, it is important to be aware of it..
⚠ When we laser cut holes in your profiles, melted pieces of metal may land on the part of the profile under the hole. These pieces will solidify and are known as metal slag. We do not remove this.
Do you have any questions about profiles in Sophia®?
This feature is available now, but is still being developed behind the scenes.
For example, our software doesn’t yet support all types of angled cuts in profiles. We are working hard to make this possible in the future. Until then, we recommend that you take this into account when preparing your drawings.
We are also working hard to continually improve the speed of the software. Because recognising profiles is more complex, importing larger projects in particular can take a little longer than you are used to.
If you have any questions or feedback, we kindly ask you to contact us so we can help you and optimise the feature.
