SOLIDWORKS Simulation Nonlinear Result Options to Save Disk Space

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Nonlinear studies include Result Options that can be defined before running the study to minimize the filesize of the results (.CWR file).  You can choose how often to save results of Stresses and Strains over the time steps.  Displacement values will always be calculated for each time step.

Within the Nonlinear study tree, right-click on Result Options and ‘Edit/Define’:

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Nonlinear Result Options

There is an option to disable saving results for Stresses and Strains.  This will only provide results for Displacements and Reaction forces if that’s the only thing required.

You can also specify how often you want the Stress/Strain values to be saved.  Specifying an Increment value will skip time steps when saving results.  Setting a Start value will skip the initial steps before starting to save.  This can be useful if you aren’t concerned with the stress early on.  Setting the End time will stop saving results at the specified step, but will keep solving all time steps for Displacements and the final step will have results for stress/strain.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Nonlinear Save Results for Specified Solution Steps

In this example, there are a total of 32 time steps.  With an Increment set to 4, it will save the stress/strain for the first time step then skip to the 5th and so on.  This gives a total available stress/strain plots of 9 instead of 32.  The result file (.CWR) was reduced from 250MB down to 140MB.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Nonlinear Displacement Plot Time Steps

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Nonlinear Stress Plot Time Steps