SolidWorks UK

Where is the colour?

In SolidWorks, you can work with colours in different ways. The rule is that the paint is harder the more local it is defined. You can easy see this by selecting the part where you are interested and click the right mouse button.


In Appearances you see where the colour is defined.

Here is a colour that is associated to a Feature, and then there is a general colour of the part.
If you want to see an overview of all colours (not Faces), you can see that at the Feature Manager.
Click on the small arrows at the top so the menu expands.



A tip is to make the colours in compilation mode, since it’s quick to add the colours and shades, even the bottom of the Parts and Face level, without having to open the details.
By pulling the colour to the part you may choose the level at which the colour is added.



Best Regards
Mattias

Tips on free software for 2D CAD

Did you know that there is free to download a program for 2D CAD, developed by Dassault Systemes?

 

The product is called DraftSight and can be downloaded here !

Get Involved…

SolidWorks Forums

One of the best ways to get involved in the SolidWorks community is through the SolidWorks Forums.

Ask questions, help others and make use of the masses of helpful info posted by other uses and SolidWorks employees.

Visit https://forum.solidworks.com

Register if you aren't already signed up for a Customer Portal account. If you already have a Customer Portal account then simply just login.

On the right you will see some links to help get you started. follow these for videos that help you get the most out of you SolidWorks Forums experience.

 

Other ways to get involved

If you have ever wished SolidWorks had a particular feature or you want to help shape the development of future releases, here are a few options for you:

Enhancement Requests*

Suggest new functionality you would like to see in SolidWorks products.

Early Visibility Program

The Early Visibility (EV) program provides you with an opportunity to review and test a Service Pack before general release.

Beta and Pre-Release Programs

Each release of SolidWorks is preceded by a beta program. Participating in beta programs gives you the opportunity to test the new release, identify any critical issues, and submit bugs for correction before the SP0 release. The 2011 beta program has changed a bit from previous years. There are more special competitions, more prizes to be awarded, and you'll have a chance to raise your visibility within the SolidWorks community. Our 2011 beta programs will be released in early July, 2010. Please log in to the Customer Portal to sign up today!

User Research Program

At SolidWorks, we constantly focus on the design of our products. With every release, we consider hundreds – if not thousands – of decisions that affect your experience. The SolidWorks User Research program helps us design products that fit your needs, and gives you the opportunity to help shape product concepts early on.

Visit the SolidWorks website for more details: http://www.solidworks.com/sw/support/get_involved.htm

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SolidWorks 2011 Beta is coming…

July sees the start of the SolidWorks 2011 Beta! Don’t forget to sign up for notifications by adding Beta News to your Customer Centre profile.

With the Beta coming very soon it has made me think of the last release and which new functionality or tools I used and got the most out of.

From my previous posts you will see I am a fan of the mouse gestures… I think these had the biggest impact on me as I soon found myself using these in a natural way, I really missed them when I was using 3DVIA Composer and even started wishing that PowerPoint and Excel had support for them too. Here are a few tips to get the most out of Mouse Gestures:

• Make the options common in all environments. This makes it easier to remember which directions do what.
• Don't worry about empty directions. If it doesn't make sense to use the gestures for an option then don't use them. For the sketch environment I only use about half of the directions.
• Go for 8 directions straight away… you don't need to remember and use them all straight away, once you have got used to a direction doing a certain command it is hard to change your automatic reactions.

Another tool that I have used quite a lot is the Assembly Visualisation tool. If you need to sort and view your assemblies by any property such as Mass or Material then Assembly Visualisation is the tool for you.

 Image (A) On the Evaluate tab you will see the Assembly Visualisation tool

Image (B) Assembly tree is sorted by Mass and colour coded to help understand the impact of mass in the design.

The assembly tree, although sorted differently is still available to interact with to open or edit any of the components.

The colours bar is editable, you can also filter the tree and graphics area to hone in on important areas of the design.

Image (C) Here the tree has been filtered by dragging the top rollback bar to show only the bought in components.

The Assembly tree and properties can also be saved out as text, Excel or in PDF format!

Now is a great time to take a look again at the 2010 What’s New PDF (found under the help menu) and refresh on some of the tools added last year while we look forward to a great 2011 Beta!

…I don’t think I mentioned that there are some great prizes this year for the best Beta testers!! Look out for notifications in July!

 

Technorati Tags: SolidWorks 2011,SolidWorks 2010,SolidWorks Tips & Tricks,SolidWorks Beta,SolidWorks

Heads Up…

As of SolidWorks 2010 the heads up toolbar can be completely customised to locate any tool that you wish to place on it. I have recently seen a couple of additions that I thought were very useful.

I always forget that you can right click on the double chevron at the top of the feature manager to change display states so I like to have the display states fly out on the toolbar.

The selection filter is also good to have on there… quick access to selection of certain types of entities without having to bring up the toolbar every time.

Creating planes and curves is always a common task… having these fly outs on the heads up bar means you don't have to go back to the features tab all the time, it also helps keep the “S” key shortcut bar cleaner.

Just right click on the heads up bar and choose “customize”. Pick the “commands” tab and simply drag and drop the commands onto the toolbar.

/Justin

Technorati Tags: SolidWorks 2010,Tips and Tricks,User Interface

Applying dead loads to fatigue

I was recently asked how to apply a dead load in a fatigue study (a none varying load that is applied to a structure all of the time, as opposed to a live or dynamic load that generates an alternating stress).

The diagram below shows the definition of alternating stress (or stress amplitude) and mean stress, both of which are important in influencing the lifetime of a material.

The normal inputs to a fatigue study are the stress amplitudes, but as you can see in the next picture, mean stresses also have an impact on the lifetime of a material. The higher the mean stress, the lower the predicted lifetime.

Dead loads are not alternating but do contribute to the mean stress, so it is important that we can consider them in a fatigue study. But how do we do this?

Alternating load only case

In a normal fatigue study, the method takes the max stress, S_max from a static study loadcase and we use the loading ratio (R = S_min/S_max) to define S_min directly.

For example,

• Picking ‘zero based’ means we define S_max but S_min = 0.
• Picking ‘fully reversed’ means we define S_max and S_min = - S_max.
• Picking ‘loading ratio’ means we can define any arbitrary S_min from the S_max value.

The fatigue setup simply allows us to pick the relevant static study and along with the loading ratio this provides our alternating stress values. These are then compared to the S-N curve to get the lifetime or damage plots.

Dead load case

Dead loads however are constant and therefore by definition not alternating. This means they only apply a non-zero mean stress, which must be considered for the reasons argued above, but cannot be applied in SolidWorks Simulation in the normal way.

The method we use therefore is the ‘Find cycle peaks’ method. This method takes the peaks of multiple loads to find the damage so we must build our static studies with the ‘peaks’ in mind.

Therefore if we had one alternating stress and one dead load, we would need two studies:

• Static study 1 including S_max and the dead load.
• Static study 2 including S_min and the dead load.

You can see here that we are not using one study for S_max and implying S_min from the loading ratio, rather we are doing two separate studies with S_max in one and S_min in the other. However both include the dead load.

Finally, in the fatigue study you reference both of these studies using the ‘Find cycle peaks’ method. This then takes both S_max + dead load and S_min + dead load extremes and combines them to find the worst case for fatigue.

Technorati Tags: SolidWorks Simulation,Fatigue,Dead Loads

SolidWorks Innovation Day

 

Register today to access:

• Must-see presentations by SolidWorks executives about sustainable design and the future of 3D CAD technology;
• Product demonstrations from SolidWorks experts;
• Countless SolidWorks Tips & Tricks;

Discover firsthand what SolidWorks 3D design tools can do for your designs, your career, and your organization. To know more about the event, please visit www.solidworks.com/InnovationDay

How long is the flow?

I was asked yesterday if it was possible to calculate how long the flow lasts inside the domain during a flow simulation? Think of this another way and it is easy to solve; how long does it take a particle to pass through the domain when it enters the flow inlet.

To do this, we therefore start off by performing a particle study:

1. Insert a new Particle Study
2. Define an injection of particles from the inlet
3. Run the Particle Study

Then, to find the time of a particle in the domain, simply RMB on the Particle Study created and View Results.

Hit the Summary button,

and you will get a table of results for each particle injected into the inlet.

 

The thing you are interested in here is the Residence Time, which is the “life time” of the particle, or how long it exists in the calculated domain.

However there are some other interesting details here too.

The Length is the physical distance travelled by the particle whilst in the domain. You will notice that each particle has a different length and residence time, and this is simply due to the fact that each particle will take different paths depending on their starting position in the flowstream.

The picture below shows this clearly as some of the inlet particles travel all around the circumference of the external pipe, whereas others travel more directly from inlet to outlet.

This means that you should consider if you need to know the min, max, or average of the residence times for your particular application.

You will also notice that the Summary table gives you the Fate of each particle and this leads us to another interesting option in Particle Studies.

If you go to the Boundary Conditions tab in the Particle Study setup and edit the default setup, you will see three options for the boundary conditions.

This determines what happens when the particles meet the walls of the domain, and the options are:

• Absorption - The particles are absorbed by the walls. This is typical for liquid particles.

• Ideal reflection - The particles are reflected from the walls. This is typical for solid particles.

• Reflection - Specify the normal and tangential restitution coefficients which are ratios of the absolute value of the normal and tangential velocity components correspondingly after and before the collision:

So the Fate of the individual particles may be to reach the opening, be absorbed, or possibly to end their time still within the domain when the calculation finishes.

Technorati Tags: SolidWorks Flow Simulation,Tips and Tricks,Particle Study,Residence Time

Futures… made of… Virtual Parts and Assemblies!

SolidWorks 2010 introduced some great new functionality to the area of Virtual parts and assemblies.

First of all lets go back to basics:
What are virtual parts and assemblies?

• A part or assembly that does not have a saved file on disk
• Saved internally in the assembly
• Can be a bought-in, non modelled item such as paint or glue
• Square brackets are used to denote the part or assembly as virtual

Virtual components are especially useful in top-down design. During the conceptual design process, when you frequently experiment with and make changes to the assembly structure and components, using virtual components has several advantages over the bottom-up design method:

• You can rename these virtual components in the FeatureManager design tree, avoiding the need to open, save as a copy, and use the Replace Components command.
• You can make one instance of a virtual component independent of other instances in a single step.
• The folder where you store the assembly is not cluttered with unused part and assembly files resulting from iterations of component designs.

So what’s new in virtual parts and assemblies in SolidWorks 2010?

• Make existing components virtual
• You can make externally saved components virtual, which breaks the link to the external component file. Existing references are ignored and the component is renamed.
• Naming virtual components
• The name of a virtual component now always includes its parent assembly's name. This ensures the virtual component is always unique.
• Copying virtual components
• You can copy virtual components between assemblies. The copy is not linked to the original virtual component. Existing references are not copied, and the copy is given a new name.
• Moving Virtual Components
• You can move virtual components within the hierarchy of the FeatureManager design tree. Existing references are ignored and the component is renamed.

Lets take a look at an example:

Technorati Tags: Virtual Components,SolidWorks 2010,Tips and Tricks

Tips for engineers

10 tips for using Microsoft Office Excel, try these today and improve your design productivity.

The screencast covers 10 tips for transforming Excel from a basic spreadsheet software into a powerful engineering application. You will learn how to input data more efficiently, build easy-to-use interfaces, utilize powerful functions for advanced calculations, and optimize how the data is displayed.