Articles by: Irfan Zardadkhan, PhD, CSWE
Have you ever tried imposing symmetry for shell elements in SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2012 or older? If you have then you would probably know it is a very tedious process and requires exact knowledge of what the symmetry condition actually does to impose it for shells….
Some time ago, I had written a blog post comparing two solvers in SolidWorks Simulations, FFEPlus and Direct Sparse. When comparing the speed of the solvers, the FFEPlus solver was beyond doubt the faster of the two solvers when handling large Degrees of Freedom. The question may now arise, why use the Direct Sparse Solver. The simplest answer is accuracy. Since the Direct Sparse solver does not make any approximations for solution, it solves the problem directly and there are no associated computational errors. The Direct Sparse Solver becomes the solver of choice in problems where the software has other iterative processes going on as well and the error can accumulate over these iterations. (Contact Problems, Large Displacement Analysis, Circular Symmetry etc.) This video demonstrates a…
So you have just received a file from your customer in the IGES format and when you open it up, you notice that its size has been scaled up by around 25. The issue is that you were expecting the units to be in mm but the file is stored in inches. One way would be to simply scale the entire model by a factor of 1/25.4 but what if this is an IGES assembly and has multiple parts. I am sure you will find some way to scale everything and put the things back together again. Here is a simple technique that you can use to correct the units stored within the IGES document. IGES documents are stored as simple ASCII documents so you will need a text editor…
SOLIDWORKS Simulation adds a new post-processing capability which allows the user to show SOLIDWORKS Simulation results on selected entities. These entities can be either bodies or faces. To view the plot on a selected entity, open the plot Property Manager and, under Advanced Options, select Show…
Perhaps the best enhancement for simulation studies is the SOLIDWORKS Simulation Submodeling capability. For studies with a large number of bodies, this feature allows users to improve results at critical areas without having to rerun the analysis in the entire model. It can allow mesh…
With SOLIDWORKS Simulation you can display the mesh and results of shells using a 3D representation of shell bodies. There is a new option to display the thickness of shells in result plots (stress, displacement, and strain) and when viewing the mesh. To view the…
Imagine a manhole cover in a pressure vessel that needs to be bolted to a flange in the pressure vessel. This usually requires a number of bolts to hold the two pieces together. Furthermore, same type of bolts may be present in the assembly at various locations. Imagine having to define all these bolt connectors for a simulation. I am sure this is going to give nightmares to people trying to simulate multiple bolts using SolidWorks Simulation. You will be happy to learn that SolidWorks Simulation has a smart feature which could reduce the effort in the definition of these bolt connectors.
SolidWorks Simulation – Use of Symmetry in Shell Elements [VIDEO]
For large problems, solid elements can often take a long time to mesh and solve. For thin bodies with constant thickness, we can replace the solid elements with shell elements which will significantly speed up the process of both meshing and solution. For bodies which are geometrically symmetric and are loaded symmetrically about a plane, the symmetry condition can also be used to speed up the analysis. The built-in symmetry condition of SolidWorks can only be applied on faces, however when shell elements are cut on a plane, the produce symmetry about edges and not faces. The symmetry condition can then be created manually using the reference geometry condition. In applying this condition, we need to restrict any displacements along the plane of symmetry and at the same time…
SolidWorks Simulation – Shell Thickness in Design Study [VIDEO]
When performing design studies in SolidWorks, you can typically link the dimensions within the model to design study parameters and then vary those dimensions to undertake design studies or design optimizations. If you use shell elements in an analysis then the thickness of the shell is defined within the simulation setup and is not part of the model itself. To perform a design study on the thickness of the shell, the thickness needs to be linked to a simulation parameter. To define this parameter, the Link Value option within the shell definition property manager can be used. Once the link value option is selected, a Parameters dialog box pops up. This can then be used to define a “Simulation Parameter” and linking this parameter to the thickness definition of the shell. Once the parameter is appropriately…