Our world is a highly nonlinear and dynamic 3D domain. To develop products that are of high quality and robust to survive the real-world conditions, it is important to test the product’s behavior and performance prior to manufacturing. Simultaneously, there is the need to accelerate product innovation and cut down the time to market. This is where simulation technology for virtual testing can help you remain ahead of your competition.

Did you know that every license of SOLIDWORKS includes the SOLIDWORKS FloXpress application? FloXpress is a computational fluid dynamics tool that evaluates the flow of fluid in a single internal cavity within parts and assemblies. Once you run a calculation on the velocity field, problem areas in your design will pop up, and you can improve them before manufacturing any parts. Different from SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation, which is meant for complex fluid analyses, FloXpress is specifically designed to analyze fluid flow in a fully enclosed volume that includes at least one inlet and one outlet.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Premium enables you to virtually test real-life scenarios more accurately. It provides you with a wide variety of material models for nonlinear analyses. Elastomers such as rubber, neoprene etc. are materials that go through large deformation very rapidly with relatively a low value of stress or applied load. In this article, we go over the different hyper elasticity material models available in SOLIDWORKS Simulation and how to use them to work with these types of materials. 

When you are designing a product, it is important to accurately analyze the varied temperatures to ensure the stability of your model. Thermal stress analysis refers to a static analysis that measures the strains, stresses and deformations that occur with changes in temperature. SOLIDWORKS Simulation enables you to test multiple conditions from static and dynamic response to heat transfer. In this blog article, we use a stainless-steel instant pot to illustrate how to properly utilize the thermal stress analysis feature for improved temperature resistance.

Sink Marks appear during the cooling process with injection molding and can be easily identified using SOLIDWORKS Plastics. Detecting them during the design phase saves time and money by avoiding manufacturing defects. Let's dive in to the ways in which you can utilize this software to easily spot the errors that cause these marks.

A day without using plastic parts is unimaginable. From consumer electronics to children’s toys, kitchen gadgets and medical devices, the use of components made from plastic materials has steadily increased. The majority of these plastics parts are produced through injection molding, the process of injecting liquefied plastic materials into a mold, cooling or solidification of the material and ejection of the molded part.  

In any simulation project, setting up the correct boundary condition and interpreting the results are the most challenging phases, regardless of the simulation software being used. Certain tools and display settings available within SOLIDWORKS Simulation result plots can help you during the simulation result interpretation process. The stress hot spot diagnostic tool, available for linear static studies using solid and shell elements, can be used to detect regions of the model where stress singularities exist, for example, sharp edges or corners or the location of fixtures.

It is important to design products that are strong yet light in weight while resisting damage against impact or unanticipated shocks and vibration. The static analysis assumes that loads are constant or applied very slowly, ignoring the effects of inertial and damping forces. For many practical cases, loads are not applied slowly. In fact, they change with time or frequency. To simulate such conditions, a dynamic analysis is required.

It is becoming increasingly important for innovative companies to accelerate new product time to market without compromising quality. In order to do this, teams need to easily perform more complex simulations that are reliable, have easy access to validation tools for quick evaluation of designs and be able to share all these results and ideas with other teams. To meet these demands, Dassault Systèmes has introduced SIMULIA Structural Simulation Engineer (SSE).

Symmetry and periodic boundary conditions in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation are used to reduce the size of the flow problem, thereby reducing analysis run time. Although these two computational domain boundary conditions are set up by editing the default computational domain, they both are very different.

The traditional design cycle creates product geometry before validating and optimizing a 3D CAD model against any requirements. After a meticulous process of sketch, analysis and prototype generation, the design may still be far from optimal due to constraints or market demands to reduce product development time. The current trend for high-quality, lightweight products with improved performance and user experience requires an optimized concept design at the very beginning of the product development cycle.