SOLIDWORKS 2015 Product Manager Showcase: What's New in Simulation

The SOLIDWORKS annual release starts with feedback provided by you, our community, and finds its way to the people responsible for including your request in our annual release. For SOLIDWORKS 2015, we wanted to introduce you to some of the people responsible for the new features and let them describe their favorite tools included in the 2015 release. Today’s SOLIDWORKS Expert is Delphine Genouvrier, Product Manager, Simulation

Delphine on what’s new: Shell Manager, one of the new features in SOLIDWORKS Simulation 2015, is sure to be a favorite of any users who regularly create large shell models for thin geometry.

The Shell Manager enables users to specify properties of shells in the model, as well as review definition of thickness and pre-defined shell model materials.

The first benefit of this new tool is to be able to look at shell properties in one shot. You can display the shells by thickness value (‘show me all shells with a thickness of 2 mm’), by material properties (‘where are the shells in Alloy Steel?’) or by checking the thickness offset on screen in 3D to ensure the offset option is correctly set for each shell. Shell Manager is a huge time saver as you do not need to select each shell one by one to check and/or understand the model definition.

The second benefit, also my favorite, is the capability to define large shell models with groups in a much easier manner. You can define multiple groups with common thicknesses and materials and then select the surface to be part of a shell definition group. The power of using groups is in being able to assign uniform properties to multiple surfaces very quickly and easily. So, if for example, we modify the middle link thickness in the model below, then the rule is applied to all of the surfaces in that group. This saves an incredible amount of time that was previously needed to adjust each surface one by one.

This new SOLIDWORKS Simulation tool has been developed from customers’ feedback based on their experiences with extensive shell models. We asked a group of users, at SOLIDWORKS World 2014, to test the Alpha version of the Shell manager so we could polish it and integrate their valuable remarks.

The New Shell Manager is a huge time saver and can help to minimize the simulation set up time for concurrent engineering during the design process and I look forward to using it regularly myself.

If you would like to learn more about SOLIDWORKS 2015, complete the below form to have a SOLIDWORKS employee contact you.