Accelerate SOLIDWORKS Product Design with SIMULIA Cloud-based Simulation

Learn how SIMULIA, built on industry-leading Abaqus technology, will accelerate your product design by solving tough engineering challenges faster. SIMULIA is a portfolio of connected, powerful and collaborative simulation solutions for SOLIDWORKS on the cloud-based 3DEXPERIENCE® Works Platform.

Product design challenges

Consumer product design has been undergoing a surge with products getting smaller while their requirements grow. If we look at projectors, we’ve seen them move from standard definition to high definition and now even 4K; we’ve also seen the integration of technology like Bluetooth speakers and Wi-Fi.  In conjunction with this the desire to miniaturize these devices continues, meaning internal components face new challenges.

In the video demonstration we’re going to look at a conceptual design for an internal bracket that stabilizes the lens in a new portable projector. A typical scenario for the bracket design is a three-point bending test to evaluate its feasibility and usage.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation can provide us with an initial solution for the three point bending test but can be time consuming and takes over 20 minutes. We have design alternatives and multiple load cases to process, this could take hours of solve time to obtain the results.

Adding Performance to SOLIDWORKS Simulation

We need to leverage some new tools available in SIMULIA Structural Engineer or SSE on the 3DEXPERIENCE Works Platform to speed up our solve time. We’ve already gotten the model in SSE using the one click connector. Let’s first review how SSE handles contact because this is a game changer. Gone are the days of having to manually define contact pairs instead of assuming that all touching faces are bonded SSE makes the assumption that all faces touching or not are no penetration which allows them to slide separate or collide and develop contact pressure.

With animated results we can see the model going through a full range of motion and we can highlight where plastic defamation has occurred while the requirement was only for 20 millimeters of defamation, we expected a worst case scenario of deflection of 80 millimeters. And within 10 minutes we were able to get results in SSE because of high strain localized buckling and complex contact. This worst-case scenario was beyond the scope of what could be solved in SOLIDWORKS Simulation.

SIMULIA high performance computing

Working between SOLIDWORKS and SIMULIA Structural Engineer

The beauty of working between SOLIDWORKS and SIMULIA Structural Engineer on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform is now when we make changes in SOLIDWORKS they can immediately be reflected in SSE and we can re-evaluate our designs quickly without redundant stats with a five minute runtime I now feel confident that I can evaluate multiple designs and multiple load cases fast.

With SIMULIA we are able to leverage an existing SOLIDWORKS Simulation setup and use the powerful Abaqus solver to get through tough FEA problems whether it’s reducing run times or solving problems that previously were outside the scope of SOLIDWORKS. SIMULIA on the 3DEXERIENCE Works Platform is the pathway for existing SOLIDWORKS Simulation users to the next generation of simulation tools.