Smartcut: Using Power Select in Simulation

I recently was working on a somewhat complex model from a customer in Simulation, and I used the Power Select tool in SOLIDWORKS to help make the job easier. Here’s a cut view of an example model so that you can see all the small faces where I needed to apply a pressure loading, and hopefully you can imagine the task of having to make sure all of them were properly selected in the Simulation load dialog box. This is where I remembered the ability of the Power Select tool to get features based on color.

So I systematically made several different selections of faces (of course also using the face filter tool) and colored them a nice Red color indicating where the pressure was to be applied. This made the task of making sure all of the required faces were grabbed since I could clearly see whether they were red or white; this was the the case for very small faces that were areas of a fillet feature.

After I was assured that I had all the faces I needed, then I invoked the Power Select tool from the drop down menu of the selection Arrow.

Then in the Power Select dialog, I chose to select only Faces, and filter them only by Face Color. Hitting the “Search” button then instantly found the 127 faces!

Upon hitting the Close button, I had all the faces pre-selected for me to apply the Pressure loading in Simulation with the confidence that I knew that I had everything.

I’m also loving the Selection Sets functionality in SOLIDWORKS 2015 in all the Simulation products. It is better to do things smarter than harder… what is called a smartcut!

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Joe Galliera

Senior Simulation Technical Manager , East area at DS SOLIDWORKS

Joe Galliera has been with SOLIDWORKS since 2002. Previously he worked in the aerospace industry primarily focusing on computational methods. He geeks out on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and nonlinear analysis.