Keith Pederson Latest Blog Articles Page 1

SOLIDWORKS Motion Simulation tools are extremely powerful and often overlooked. In this series, we are working hard to help you see the value of using these tools. In our last installment, we learned that by using blocks we can make layout sketches for machine design that can contain sub-structures for faster performance, effective change control and motion.

Up to now, we have only considered sketching in a single plane. In this post, we will look at how a single 3D sketch can play host to any number of 2D sub-sketches. This gives you the power of 3D linkages whenever you need it and the ease of 2D control for the rest of your motion elements.

SOLIDWORKS Motion Simulation tools are, to a surprising degree, under-implemented and I’m on a mission to change that. In our last installment, we explained why the use of Sketches is a sound foundation for starting a machine design project, and why the use of Sketch Blocks helps bring structure, best performance, and especially motion to your sketch.

In this article, we explore blocks in a bit more detail. We will cover some special sketch relations that apply only to blocks specifically to allow you to capture common motion elements of machine design.

Every SOLIDWORKS user has the power to leverage motions synthesis and simulations tools. In this article, we’re going to prove it by covering functions that are available in every license level of SOLIDWORKS, as well as every version, going all the way back to 2007.

We are going to start by taking a closer look at part sketches, which is the easiest and fastest way to synthesize a desired motion in SOLIDWORKS. You can do planar, 2D mechanism design in a single SOLIDWORKS part file, and within a single sketch. We can then use blocks in the sketch to group lines. Lines grouped into a block gain positional independence, and so then serve as the parts and sub-assemblies of your machine. All of these layers of power build upon a strong understanding of how the SOLIDWORKS dynamic constraint solver works in a sketch.

SOLIDWORKS motion tools are powerful features included in the software that can be easily overlooked. We think they are so important that we have created a series of articles to help you see the value and the power of these motion design tools, many of which you have in the version of SOLIDWORKS you’re already using. With this knowledge, you will start hitting SOLIDWORKS harder, diving deeper into the menus and getting more value from your software investment. We’ll start small, covering the tools inside SOLIDWORKS Standard that everyone has in their subscription and work up to techniques only available to users with Simulation Professional, or Simulation Premium licenses.

Tutorials and training materials focus a great deal on how to push the buttons with your Flow Simulation software. But the first (and most important) step is your model preparation. That’s mostly done in CAD. A lot of hotline calls that seem to be about failed boundary conditions or bad meshing, really end up being about the model prep.