How do you test your design?

Whatever product you design, be it a heart valve, a bracket, an electronic enclosure or a dish washer, you must be certain that your product will perform according to its specifications. How do you know it? How do you make sure it will indeed meet its requirements?

You might use hand calculation or your gut feeling…can you check everything with this approach? Too often it leads to over dimensioning and then cost increase. Besides, you only have ten fingers after all.

You might decide to conduct physical prototyping for some critical products. Can you afford to create prototypes for your entire product line? At what point during the design process do you test it? How often can you test the prototype? How do you account for test results and make adjustments in the design process? Often, because of the time and the cost it requires and the fact that you need to be in a phase where you can manufacture a product to test it, companies only test critical products and late in the design cycle.

You might outsource testing or simulation to external companies. How many tests do you need to run? What is the cost and how do you iterate between your design team and the external team to implement the insight provided by simulation?

Whatever methods you are using now, do you know there is a better strategy which will help you achieve the technical insight you need when you need it to design better product? CAD Embedded Simulation now helps the product engineering community test the performance and quality of their products concurrent to the design phase so they can leverage simulation results for a better design.

With simulation technology becoming increasingly important to everyday design work, DS SOLIDWORKS is launching a new offer: SOLIDWORKS Simulation Standard. This new structural analysis (FEA) offer helps any product engineer determine early in the design process if their product will work and how long it will perform.

By using SOLIDWORKS Simulation Standard in the design process, questions of performance and durability are answered through four key features:

Linear Static Analysis calculates the stresses and deformations of a 3D model to determine the response of parts and assemblies due to the effect of forces, pressures, temperatures and contact between components.

Trend Tracker helps product engineers detect trends in results from different iterations of a static study. It enables you to measure the impact of his design changes on this criteria, such as FOS, stress level, weight

Time-Based Motion Analysis offers a true physical calculation of the forces and motions of an assembly as it would move under environmental loads (external forces) and/or internal loads (motors, springs, and dampers).

Metal Fatigue Analysis examines how repeated or random load cycles can cause structural failure providing insight into product lifecycle.

SOLIDWORKS Simulation Standard enables product engineers to take two, complementary approaches to design analysis: Design for Strength, considering the ultimate strength of their components and Design for Life for fatigue prediction, to design better products.

Discover how SOLIDWORKS Simulation Standard, structural analysis fully integrated inside SOLIDWORKS 3D CAD, and how it will enable you to:

Quickly and efficiently adjust designs to meet the required strength.
Evaluate early in the design process how your product will move throughout its operational cycle and create the correct mechanism to ensure performance, product quality, and safety.
Establish recommended maintenance schedules and maximize product life.

Click here to learn more about how SOLIDWORKS Simulation Standard can help you create the best possible products in the shortest time.