GoEngineer Blog

We recently had a customer call our SOLIDWORKS technical support line worried that his master weldment model was corrupted because of a missing cut list folder in the SOLIDWORKS FeatureManager design tree. It wasn’t that his cut list was missing, it was that his cut list folder was hidden from the FeatureManager design tree.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation is commonly used on a model with a combination of fixtures and known force loads to find displacement and stress data from such loading conditions. At times though, it is not known what applied force to place on a model whereas the displacement of the model is known and the applied force is the desired quantity to be measured.

The use of sheet metal bodies in SOLIDWORKS Simulation provides a streamlined study setup workflow. The nature of sheet metal geometry leads to the utilization of shell elements to represent their shape in a simulation study. The use of solid elements is prohibitive due to the large aspect ratio difference between the span and thickness of sheet metal bodies. Their usage would lead to very large mesh size and corresponding computational effort.

There are a few ways to apply separate appearances to a part file in SOLIDWORKS Visualize! Note that you do not need a multibody part to accomplish this! Split your parts in Visualize. If you open a multibody part file in Visualize with only one color (or no colors) applied in SOLIDWORKS, all items will be in the same grouping.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation will automatically create beam joints when you create a study with parts created with weldments, or if you treat a solid body as a beam inside of your analysis.

SOLIDWORKS PDM users often experience popups upon executing a command such as opening a SOLIDWORKS file. In this case, by default, SOLIDWORKS PDM launches a popup that wants to know if you are opening a file with the intent to modify or make changes to it, or if you are simply opening it to view the file. The prompt shown below asks the user if they would like to check the file out. At this point, the user has a choice and is encouraged to decide if the intent is to make changes to the file, and thus you would want to check the file out. 

 

Symbols are useful tools to simply convey valuable information in a SOLIDWORKS drawing. However, it may be useful to create a custom symbol for proprietary or other use. There are two ways to create custom symbols in SOLIDWORKS: the easy way and the hard way. The easy way utilizes SOLIDWORKS Sketch tools to create a block and may take 1-2 minutes.

 

 

 

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, we discussed the definitions of continuity in sketches and surfaces. This included C-0 (contact), C-1 (tangent), and C-2 (curvature) continuity in both 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional scenarios. When striving to create a certain type of continuity, it is often important that we confirm its presence. In this article, we will discuss edge continuity, Deviation Analysis, Curvature Display, and Zebra Stripes.

In our introduction to continuity and curvature in SOLIDWORKS (Part 1), we discussed the concepts of continuity, tangency, and curvature and used them to establish a 2-dimensional definition of C-0 (Contact), C-1 (Tangent), and C-2 (Curvature) continuity. In this blog, part 2, we will focus on these concepts in a 3-dimensional context inside of SOLIDWORKS and the tools we can use to analyze them.