TriMech Blog

As I mentioned in my other post, I was fortunate to have the opportunity as a high school student to learn engineering and architecture through a program similar to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). So in honor of National STEM Day for the young minds we’ll take a peek into some kinetics (motion). 

I was fortunate to have the opportunity as a high school student to learn engineering and architecture through a program similar to STEM. I used this as a stepping stone to go to college for mechanical engineering. Then I found a great career with a large automaker and started really learning about practical applications. 

The release of SOLIDWORKS 2019 provides us with some of the best performance enhancements and improvements to date. These are based on customer feedback so SOLIDWORKS continues to reflect real-world applications. Below is a overview of the best new performance features we found in the SOLIDWORKS 2019 release.

It's probably needless for me to say that technology is ever evolving. It’s amazing to see where we’ve come in the last 20 years when looking at the computers we work with and how we communicate, play and work. In the past five years, we've seen two areas that have been gaining a lot of traction: virtual and augmented reality technology (VR/AR). It’s fair to say that we’ve seen huge leaps in VR/AR when comparing even the last five years to the last twenty. Certainly, the underlying technologies like high-speed graphics, high-definition mobile displays and high capacity batteries have contributed to this boom, but also the diversity of applications the technology has brought to users. CAD seemed like a natural fit for VR/AR applications. Let’s take a look at what SOLIDWORKS has done with VR/AR over the years and where it looks to take it into the future.

With every new release of SOLIDWORKS, there are hundreds of enhancements. Some are brand new tools, while others are improvements to the already powerful SOLIDWORKS toolset. Along with the new functionality, you’ll find a lot of improvements to both the system and modeling performance that will amount to huge time savings. Here are some of my personal favorites in SOLIDWORKS 2019, which offer compelling reasons for why you should upgrade sooner rather than later to this version.

These days more and more consumer products are made with the ability to connect to the internet. Some common home appliances that you’ve always used, might now be able to connect to other devices. Refrigerators, microwaves, doors, coffee makers, lights – all these items are part of a category called IoT or the Internet of things.

When visiting our clients, we have noticed a trend. Some teams decide not to upgrade their SOLIDWORKS with yearly updates or service packs. Many of our clients have chosen to stay around SOLIDWORKS 2016 for many reasons, but mainly due to the comfort zone formed after prolonged use. But as we move into SOLIDWORKS 2019, there are simply too many optimizations and improvements to ignore! This new edition of SOLIDWORKS focuses on the entire ecosystem of taking a design from a preliminary idea to a final product by putting a spotlight on quality and assembly performance, along with a ton of other tool developments we would love to see you take advantage of. This post will briefly discuss some of our favorite improvements.

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.

Many things come with fall; leaves changing color, cooler temperatures, warm drinks… and a new release SOLIDWORKS! This means it's officially update season, and there are a few things you should check to make sure it's a smooth, easy process. We broke this down into four main sections, Copy Settings Wizard, Custom File Location, Hardware Specs and Installation Type.

The CommandManager in SOLIDWORKS is a fantastic dock for tools that allows users to view all their available “commands” or actions at once under specific category tabs. These category tabs can be customized, allowing each to be added or removed as needed, whether it's Features, Sketch or any of the other groups.

Every now and then, a PDM user or vault administrator envisions a usage case that's just a bit outside the current PDM functionality, or possibly in a different wheelhouse altogether. This happens with the newly initiated, as well as software veterans. You'll use a feature and think, "If only there was a button to [insert idea here]."

Are none of SOLIDWORKS' default weldment profiles working for your project? Check out this short step-by-step tutorial on using configured sketches to create your own custom weldment profiles.

(Click the images to enlarge.)