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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.

We all want one thing from SOLIDWORKS Simulation — the truth! But sometimes the results can be misleading in areas of high stress. We often wonder is this high stress real? Or is it artificial or fake? There are ways to get to the bottom of this, but most approaches are tedious and require many subsequent runs of the simulation. Thanks to the SOLIDWORKS Hot Spot Diagnostics tool, you can uncover the truth in your simulations and more easily identify stress singularities versus stress concentrations.

Providing a safe and healthy manufacturing environment is crucial to the well-being of the employees operating the manufacturing floor. Proper ventilation is one of the ways in which you can contribute to their safety. Most of the time, the machinery used in manufacturing floors produces heat, fumes or haze that can have an effect in the productivity of the workers. So, how can you improve the ventilation conditions in your manufacturing floor?

SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation makes solving complex fluid dynamics problems easy. Even though setting up a model may take only a matter of minutes, sometimes we run into scenarios that require a significant amount of computation time. For example, some problems deal with processes that develop at different rates and if the difference in the rate at which these processes develop is significant, the CPU time or solve time might be dominated by the slower process. In this article, we look at how to use the Flow Freezing capability in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation to complete these time-intensive computations.

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.

Like a lot of people right now, I’ve been working from home and wearing home-made face masks to help slow the spread of COVID-19 whenever I go out on essential errands. I thought it would be interesting to use a tool like SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation to see the difference these kinds of masks can make. Contrary to what you may think, it is surprisingly easy to set up these types of simulations. I hope this article will help remove some of that intimidation and encourage you to experiment as well.

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.

“This is how we’ve always done it.”

Your current process might have helped define your success years ago, but is it honestly still relevant in today’s global and more technology-empowered competitive landscape? How much time and effort could you save by taking a fresh look at something as simple as communication between your product development teams? A lot, as it turns out!

I have been a SOLIDWORKS user for about six years, using it mostly for CAD, but sometimes for running my designs through structural simulation analysis. The CAD software I used prior to SOLIDWORKS was slower and this process took extra time to set up. I had to export and import .STEP files between different software, and even though it worked in the end, it seemed like running simulations took forever. My experience since changing to SOLIDWORKS Simulation has been very different. In this blog article, I show you how I used SOLIDWORKS Simulation to run a simple static study.

Having spent some time working at a local battery company started from Carnegie Mellon, I saw firsthand as a SOLIDWORKS user how companies in the energy sector utilize the software. It would be very narrow-minded to exclude the totality of this industry. There are many products in the SOLIDWORKS portfolio, if leveraged properly, that can be powerful for those in the industry, from oil/gas, hydroelectric power generation, hydrogen power and many more. During my time at the battery company, I utilized the SOLIDWORKS mechanical design suite of products including the basics with sketching, product and assembly design to the more advanced capabilities and SOLIDWORKS validation products. In this blog, I go through a very high-level overview of the tools most likely to be used by a designer in this field.

SimulationXpress is a built-in, first-pass design verification tool created to quickly and easily put a single-body part through a structural study in SOLIDWORKS. This great tool is included with every license of SOLIDWORKS, after an easy activation and allows the user to do simple stress analysis simulation studies without the need to purchase an additional SOLIDWORKS Simulation package. In this blog post, we take a look at the top five features that make SOLIDWORKS SimulationXpress the tool you should be using with any part that you design.

So many improvements in SOLIDWORKS 2020, so little time! With the vast amount of upgrades and additions they make each year, it can be overwhelming trying to sift through them all, and often, useful tools and changes are missed. To ensure you are getting the most of your software, we are providing twelve on-demand webinars full of demonstrations, updates, explanations and explorations of SOLIDWORKS.