What’s New in SOLIDWORKS – Design and Modeling R2024x FD03

By

If you read my last blog, you now know that you don’t have to wait for an annual release to begin using the latest features of SOLIDWORKS, including CAD, collaboration and data management enhancements, as enhancements become available throughout the year in functional deliveries (FD).

The latest update of SOLIDWORKS R2024x FD03 is now available, and enhancements include interference checking for surfaces, better capabilities for collaboration between electrical and mechanical designers, the ability to use SOLIDWORKS PDM inside 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS and more!

These enhancements apply to 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS, SOLIDWORKS with Cloud Services, and SOLIDWORKS with Collaborative Designer for SOLIDWORKS.

Let’s get a glimpse of what’s new.

Include Surface Bodies in Interference Checks – detect intersections between solids and surfaces.

You all know we can do interference checks between solid parts, but we’ve added the capability to check interferences between solid parts and surfaces. In addition, you can run interference checks between surfaces and other surfaces. Sometimes imported geometry, such as components to be used in an assembly, comes through as surface bodies and you’ll want to check for interferences.

Check interferences between surfaces and solid parts, in addition to interferences between surfaces and other surfaces.

 

ECAD/MCAD IMPROVEMENTS

Typically, communication between electrical designers and mechanical designers is done in a very loose manner that is time consuming and not the most ideal workflow. Eliminate communication barriers with improved CircuitWorks collaboration capabilities that enable mechanical designers and electrical designers to easily send changes back and forth. Improve ECAD/MCAD collaborative design by capturing circuit board changes made by mechanical engineers and allowing electrical designers to understand and quickly compare the board assembly to the last version of the design.

In addition, with a new Cadence OrCAD X integration you can identify a new assembly of the PCB assembly, and then you can export that to CircuitWorks, and send it to the electrical designer for review.

When it comes to harness and wires things can get complex so how do you design that? And then how do you manufacture that? Anytime you provide harness and cable or harness information to manufacturing, you have to flatten it out so they can manufacture it. And of course you have flattening capabilities, but now you have more options. For instance, you can edit harnesses comprised of either bundles of discrete wires or single segments using the straighten edit methodology for flattened assembly configurations with ‘reverse direction’ or ‘% change’ functionality.

Edit harnesses comprised of either bundles of discrete wires or single segments.

 

In addition, selected changes to an electrical harness design will now make incremental updates to the flattened configuration in a predictable way and maintain manual refinements to the original design.

Plus, you can handle splices positioned in a bundle or in a loop more efficiently; position junction points in an electrical loop on the flatten plane; and rotate multi-conductor splices to the flatten plane in the harness flattening process.

The ECAD/MCAD enhancements above give you more control when flattening wires, and speed up the creation of design changes, as well as harness design and documentation by giving you better handling of electrical splices in the flattening process.

Integrating SOLIDWORKS PDM with 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS – flexibility to save locally or on the cloud.

For SOLIDWORKS PDM users, good news. There’s a new option in in 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS that you can set that enables you to save your parts to SOLIDWORKS PDM locally on your machine. Learn more about this enhancement in an upcoming blog from my colleague Salih Alani.

A new option enables you to save to your SOLIDWORKS PDM database.

 

To see these enhancements and much more in action, including the product management team’s favorites, see this post on the 3DSWYM Community where you can connect with your peers and stay up to date on all SOLIDWORKS news.

Craig Therrien

Craig Therrien

Craig Therrien is a 3DEXPERIENCE WORKS Senior Portfolio Manager with over 30 years of CAD and industry experience - engineer, consultant, CAD product manager, CAD company co-founder. Currently, serving as Senior Product Manager for SOLIDWORKS and 3D Mold Creator. Craig has a B.S.M.E. from WPI and is a Graduate of General Electric's Manufacturing Development Program.