Simulation (5) Page 5

327 in³ of model material. 298 in³ of support material. 250 hours of print time. 41 parts. 20 hours of building and assembly. 1 kayak. 

Having already designed the wood stringers with SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD in part 1 and refined the shape of the kayak for buoyancy, stability and draw with Flow Simulation in part 2,  the third step in designing a 3D printed kayak is designing the interior structure. In this blog, I'll show how to create the geometry to hold the stringers in place.

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.

Being a swim mom, I spend a lot of time in places that are hot, humid and smell of chlorine. My daughter swims competitively year-round, so there is rarely a weekend where I am not sitting poolside, sweating while cheering her on. One thing that has always caught my attention, is the number of girls swimming with long hair. Olympic men shave their bodies to reduce drag, so what can a thin swim cap do to prevent drag for a girl with long hair? There also doesn't seem to be any reasoning behind where the lump of hair ends up on their head. This made the engineering side of my brain wake up and question if the location of the lump under the cap mattered at all.  

The Fourth of July is a great time to enjoy fireworks, friends, and food. For me, the Fourth is also a signal to prepare for the impending harvest of blueberries. While I eat as many fresh-off the bush berries I can, freezing is required keep this fruit available year-round. However, it is not as simple as just throwing a bag of berries in the freezer.

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.