Simulation Page 1

SOLIDWORKS Simulation is an incredibly capable tool to help you and your company validate your designs. This can be anything from being able to do basic checks of a metal bracket's thickness to doing nonlinear analysis of a rubber o-ring being pressed into a channel. Having the capability to run a simulation test is certainly beneficial, but depending on your computer’s hardware specifications, your simulations may tie up your computer for a good portion of the day.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Premium provides the capability to do Offloaded Simulations, which allows users to push the actual solving of a simulation over to another computer and view results on their own computer. Let's see how this works. 

To err is human. To err in a virtual environment early in the design process is intelligent. When design and manufacturing companies launch new or improved products, it’s difficult to always get it right the first time. It’s nearly impossible to get it perfect. Simulation, or virtual prototyping, is the most cost-effective way to transition a design to production and is a key technology to consider within Industry 4.0.

Which one do you choose, SOLIDWORKS Simulation or SIMULIA? This is quite a common question when solutions overlap with each other a little bit. But a true answer to this question arises not only from the kind of studies we are able to perform but also from what happens upstream and downstream of the design process.

Structural Mechanics Engineer (SME) is a comprehensive structural simulation SaaS (software as a service) solution on the 3DEXPERIENCE cloud-based platform. Powered by the market leader, Abaqus solver (finite element analysis) technology, SME can solve sophisticated structural and dynamics problems with higher fidelity.

Designing your product to operate at the right temperature can be crucial to its success. Whether you’re creating goods for the consumer market, military applications, industrial machinery, transportation, medical – you name it – the ability of your product to maintain desired temperatures can make or break a product…and your reputation.

How do you make sure your product can meet its temperature expectations? How do you manage excessive heat in lighting and electronics? How do you design vehicle HVAC systems to keep their occupants comfortable? How do you make sure that your equipment won’t overheat and fail on the plant floor or in the field?

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.