WHY YOU SHOULD BE SUBMODELING USING SOLIDWORKS SIMULATION ?

SOLIDWORKS Simulation comes with powerful virtual testing environment that helps product engineers in efficiently evaluating structural product performance under a variety of physical scenarios.

Furthermore, SOLIDWORKS Simulation is fully embedded within SOLID WORKS 3D CAD and therefore enables engineers to evaluate products mechanical resistance, natural frequencies, product durability as well as test heat transfer and buckling instabilities.

Submodeling is based on the St. Venant's principle. The St. Venant's principle states that the stresses on a boundary reasonably distant from an applied load are not significantly altered if this load is changed to a statically equivalent load. The distribution of stress and strain is altered only near the regions of load application.

Talking about Submodeling, it offers a swift and easy way of zooming in on a component of interest. Because it creates a sub-study using displacement results of the parent study while isolating the part you need to be focusing on, it renders ease of operation with quick results.

You can use Submodeling on SOLIDWORKS Simulation to the fullest by removing away the rest of the assembly which may not be required anymore and use finer mesh for gaining accurate results, more so without raising the solution time.

Submodeling is available in Simulation Professional and above and requires a parent study. It comes with plenty of advantages, and it is the optimal way to gain quick results that are high in quality.

Being a fundamental component of SOLIDWORKS Simulation, Submodeling is a necessity to learn and understand. When in Toronto, you have the benefit of receiving the required training at FEA Training Consultants, which has the award-winning certified instructors with years of experience. The instructors brilliantly cover the entire process from meshing to results evaluation for parts and assemblies. 

Update Standard Views

Update Standard Views

You can update standard views from the Orientation dialog box (Shortcut - Spacebar) or by using the menu options. If you have imported a part or started a design and then want to change the part’s orientation to better fit with your overall design you can use the below method.

You can also update standard views without using the Orientation dialog box by clicking View > Set Current View As and selecting the desired view.

We will go through this using the below model for which we want to make the Right view orientation to be the Front view orientation. Below are the images of Isometric and Front View of the model.

Isometric View

Front View

 

To update standard views from the Orientation dialog box (Keyboard shortcut to get orientation dialog box is Spacebar), do one of the following:

1.    Use the Rotate, Zoom, and Pan tools to orient the model.

2.    Click View Selector and select a view.

3.    Select a view from the Orientation dialog box.

We orient the model in Right view and Click Update Standard Views as shown below.

 

 

When prompted, select the standard view you want to assign the current view to. In our case we select the Front View since we want to make the below orientation Front view of the model.

 

 

It will ask you to confirm the update - say 'yes' in the dialog box

 

 

 

The model changes the Standard views and below are the images of Isometric and Front View of the model.

Isometric View

 

 

Front View

 

For any reason you want to reset the view orientation, use the Reset Standard Views option as shown below.

 

How to Change Orientation of Imported Geometry

Change Orientation of Imported Geometry

 

The View orientation of Imported Parts when imported into SolidWorks may not be what is desired for our design. So we can end up with a view that is twisted or at some obscure angle or with an Origin that is away from the actual part and this can make it difficult to insert into an assembly or create a drawing for the part.

Let’s understand this with the below example. Here we can see that when we imported the part, the tab is at an angle. We want the tab to be vertical.

We select a face or a plane that will be one of our three Standard Planes and start a new Sketch. As shown below we create two lines that are perpendicular to each other.

 

 

Now we select the Coordinate System command from Features toolbar as shown below.

 

Here we select the intersection of both lines as our origin. Then we select the lines and make them along X axis and Y axis. If they are in the opposite direction then we can use the Flip option.

 

As shown below a new Coordinate system is created.

Now we save the part as a Neutral format (Parasolid, STEP, IGES etc.) file using the newly created coordinate system as the Output coordinate system.

Once saved we reimport the part and as shown below it uses the new coordinate system and the tab is vertical.

Mirroring Asymmetric Components (New in SolidWorks 2014)

We have a new option to mirror Asymmetric components starting 2014 version of SolidWorks which we will go through using the below file as an example.

We select the Mirror command from the Assembly toolbar and in that we have a new option in the Mirror Property Manager to select the Mirror type. Shown below is the result with the Center of Mass option selected. This option positions the mirror so that the center of mass of the selected component is mirrored about the mirror plane.

Shown below is the result with the Bounding Box center option selected. This option mirror’s so that the center of the bounding box for the selected component is mirrored about the mirror plane.