TriMech Blog

If your CAD designs are going to be stamped in the long run, you need Altair Inspire Form. Discover how your physical designs can deal with force before production, and avoid a broken or wrongly dented physical prototype.

Knowing how your design will react as it withstands use is important. However, if you are able to discover a negative reaction or behavior before you go to production you can make the needed adjustments and save your company lots of time and money. When dealing with metal designs, Altair Inspire Extrude Metal is the simulation tool you need.

One simple way to save time, money and resources when 3D printing anything is to first run a simulation on your designs. There are many different simulation tools that have the ability to do this, such as Altair Inspire Extrude Polymer, when you want to run a polymer extrude simulation. 

A name isn't the only thing that's new in Altair Inspire Cast (formerly Click2Cast). When they changed the name they packed in a lot of updates that will help you make better informed decisions about your cast before it hits the manufacturing stage.

Engineers often need to answer questions regarding heat transfer in their designs. As with many other things, the specific task or question being asked will determine what tool to use to get the best result. Here we look at answering the question of when to use Finite Element Analysis (FEA) vs. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in heat transfer problems.

TriMech is fortunate to work with clients from Maine to Florida and out to Arkansas, offering a range of engineering solutions. This week's client story showcases parts validation in the Nuclear Industry and the use of SOLIDWORKS Simulation.

Yesterday, we released the first video blog of our five-part series showcasing our process of designing and 3D printing a skin-on-frame kayak. We theorized that with SOLIDWORKS solutions, designing and testing a skin-on-frame kayak would be much faster and cheaper than building physical prototypes. This allows us to ultimately 3D print and build a full-size kayak, with relative ease, to test on open waters. In the first video segment, we completed the initial design in SOLIDWORKS, allowing us to move on to testing, which is part two of the series.

A popular question among SOLIDWORKS users is “How do I determine volume marking levels in containers?" Perhaps you have run into a similar scenario in the past. This is easy if the container has a regular shape (like a cylinder or pyramid), but it becomes a bit more challenging when the container has an irregular shape.

The end-use of a product should be at the forefront of your mind when you're in the design process. However, consumer products are often able to be used for multiple purposes which makes prototyping an important step. But did you know that before you print out several mock-ups you can look at each stage of design validation utilizing simulation software? Lucky for you, we have a three-part webinar series where we demonstrate and explain this all for you. 

Look out Wilson—TriMech has rendered our own NCAA official basketball for March Madness this year. Check out what TriMech thinks about this year's bracket, our favorite teams and how we used SOLIDWORKS to get our logo on the game ball. 

One of the best aspects of SOLIDWORKS is that it’s not just a 3D CAD tool, but that it's a complete engineering solution. Tools like SOLIDWORKS Simulation help us analyze our designs and test them for critical attributes such as strength and fatigue. In SOLIDWORKS 2017 and previous versions, Simulation Professional even included a tool that would allow us to optimize our design for a set goal while varying many of our design parameters. This took a lot of the guesswork out of creating the best possible design and reduced the number of iterations that were required in the design cycle. SOLIDWORKS Simulation Professional now includes Topology studies.

Did you know there is a major untapped resource within SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation? And it may be the answer to all your metal casting problems! Say goodbye to fits, restarts, re-tooling and launch delays with Thermal Flow.