GoEngineer Blog

One of our favorite SOLIDWORKS capabilities is to pattern components in assemblies. This function gives us the ability to quickly populate assemblies with multiple parts in sequence. We can do this without having to insert and mate each individual instance. It’s a real time-saver for designers. And, it enables us to build complete assemblies much quicker.

If you haven’t discovered it yet, SOLIDWORKS has a great feature that can greatly increase the performance when evaluating large assemblies. It’s SOLIDWORKS Large Assembly Design Review Mode.

This article is about a new interface enhancement to SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation, fan derating, that can be found in SOLIDWORKS 2020. Fans can operate at different speeds. In order to slow down a fan in Flow Simulation 2019 and prior, you would have to manually adjust their fan curve using a spreadsheet. Now in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation 2020, you can view and adjust their fan curve directly in the Fans PropertyManager.

In all versions of SOLIDWORKS Simulation, Remote Loads can be created using two connection types: Rigid and Distributed. Now with Simulation 2020, we can use these same two options with Bolt and Pin connectors as well. To see the difference between these options, I’ve run a few comparison studies to illustrate what they are doing. Can you tell the difference between these two stress plots?

New in SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2020 it is possible to define Draft Quality mesh elements or High Quality mesh elements for each individual solid body in the simulation study creating a hybrid mesh. This new capability will be helpful in saving your meshing resources. It gives you more control on which solid body you can apply either a Draft or High Quality element type too.

There are a number of reasons why you might need to change the serial number that is installed on your computer. Maybe you were given an evaluation license to start out and now your permanent license is available. Perhaps there was already a permanent license installed on your computer, but it’s the wrong license and it needs to be changed.

Due to the nuance of the FDM process and it’s the ability to self-support to a certain degree, both through holes, and blind holes extending in a horizontal direction are prime candidates for support elimination. This is especially true for smaller holes or in situations where hole accuracy/roundness are not critical to the usefulness of the finished part.

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a feature included on Windows machines beginning with Windows XP Service Pack 2. This feature monitors memory (Processes and Services) to stop malicious code from running. DEP does this by shutting down a program that isn’t running properly in memory. For the most part, the best practice is not to make changes to DEP, however sometimes this can cause an issue when running your SOLIDWORKS program. This document will show you how to disable this feature.

For my senior design capstone class, my team worked on the advanced navigation for the Portable Accessible Docking System (PADS), which is part of the Technology Recreation Access Independence Lifestyle Sports (TRAILS) program whose goal is the revolution of rehabilitation of tetraplegics (those with partial or total loss of use of all four limbs and torso).