Adaptive Methods of Meshing

SolidWorks Simulation offers the user for error estimation with the adaptive methods. These methods are mainly focussed on the approach of improving the accuracy of results for the simulation studies. In the domain of approach towards the accuracy of results, FEA provides major development in estimating errors. Thus, mesh refinement has major role towards this development process.

The adaptive meshing is a tool which iteratively varies the mesh settings for the model without the manual interference. SolidWorks Simulation has two adaptive methods i.e. p-adaptive & h-adaptive.

The h-adaptive meshing physically adjusts the size of the cell in areas of the model where smaller mesh is required.

The p-adaptive meshing normally adjusts the polynomial order of the mesh to improve the accuracy of the results. The user can directly select any of the option inside the software.

h-adaptive meshing technique:

• Varies the refinement level
• Varies the density of the mesh
•  Automatically done without any manual interference

p-adaptive meshing technique:

• Controls the starting order of elements
• More efficient in regions with high errors
• Automatic global convergence criteria

SOLIDWORKS 2016 SP 4.0

MAKE GREAT DESIGN HAPPEN

SolidWorks has fulfilled their customer’s need of getting back the Classic color and Sketch Tool Pointer back to its classic Style. Check out, the all new SOLIDWORKS 2016 SP 4.0 Highlights.

Sketch Tools Pointers

The sketch tools pointers have changed to use a pencil-themed icon, similar to the icons used in SOLIDWORKS 2015 and earlier. The crosshair-themed sketch tools pointers are no longer used.

More Color in Icons

More color is used in icons for the default and classic icon sets.

Clarity of icons has improved by introducing highlight colors, such as

• Yellow for lightning bolts and pencils,
• Green for open and import arrows
• Magenta for selection filters.

Contact us for more info on what’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2016:

http://www.egsindia.com/solidworks-2016/index.html

COFFEE MUG THERMAL ANALYSIS

Modern day manufacturers are extensively focussing on producing light weight components using good testing methods. Heat and Mass transfer is a key area for any product development and material selection next to structural simulation.

The Coffee Mug is a typical example to study the Temperature & Modes of Heat Transfer. The mug is formed to hold liquids within the walls resulting in gain or loss of thermal energy for the heat conduction. Temperature is a scalar quantity, where only one degree of freedom is required to study on the models. The resulting temperature are differentiated for temperature gradients & calculates the heat flux based on the thermal conductivity of the material.

The Thermal analysis present in SolidWorks Simulation deals with the Heat Flow in a Solid body governing the enter and exit of temperature on that body. The entering & Exit of temperature is studied by the conduction, convection & radiation modes. For this simple example, liquid heat flows through the wall with the surrounding ambient air. The Natural convection is considered for the fluid movement from becoming Hot to Cold. The heat transfer is studied with the help of Thermal transient analysis to stabilize the temperature on the cup with the fluid for time period.

The cup is made up of ceramic porcelain material with thermal conductivity value of 1.5W/m.K. The inside fluid temperature is considered to be 70°C with the ambient temperature of 30°C for 2 minutes of time.

Thermal analysis in SolidWorks Simulation calculates the temperature and heat transfer within and between components in your design and its environment. This is an important consideration of design, as many products and material have temperature dependent properties. Product safety is also a consideration-if a product or component gets too hot, you may have to design a guard over it. Thus, to overcome all the temperature effects for product design, SolidWorks Simulation is useful in solving problems.

PDM or PLM? What does YOUR Company Need?

How to link SolidWorks EPDM Data Card Values with Excel

Overview

SolidWorks EPDM performs Various task, in which Linking Data Card Values with an Excel document creates a basic understanding on how EPDM easily integrated with various tool. This is most needed yet most organization find it quite difficult to link various documents with the company's customized data card. This article provides information on how to perform this above task.

Procedure

Inside Admin Tool

Create a new variable inside the administration tool on the appropriate vault that will be used in the card, give a variable name, variable type. Create New Attribute with Block Name and Attribute Name which need to be connected with the Excel. Provide the extension to make the work simple as possible.

After assigning a New Variable, make sure that the variable get positioned inside the data card. Hence create a field for that variable and map it to the variable name. Office card(Word, Excel) will be used to extract various information about the vendors, suppliers etc, make sure that variable get connected to the exact data card.

Inside Excel

Create a Excel file from the EPDM Vault, Click on the cell, which the property needs to be renamed. The Cell name is entered. The Cell name must be unique to the current sheet and do not contain any spaces in between them.

Inside the Custom Properties type the 'Name', same as that used in the new variable 'Attribute Name'. This Cell name is entered 'Source' Tab, mark 'Link to Content' . Save and close the Excel sheet.

Trial

This is two way method. Either you can enter the comment in the 'Note' tab inside the data card and save it. This will appear inside the Excel sheet.

or

Enter the text in the appropriate cell, save and close the excel, automatically Data Card with that note will appear.

Hence you can link your EPDM Data Card with Excel Document.

Importance of GDandT for Manufacturing Industries

CFD Approach Towards the Trend Changes in Valve Industries

Valves are the traditional devices for regulating the flow of liquids, gases or any fluidized solids. They are the major backbone for pipeline & multi process oriented industries. Over the past, there is an increased demand for innovative technologies to meet the industrial requirements. With the demand, the valve sectors should also maintain lower fabrication costs & development time and come up with new designs to grow substantially in the market. Thus, for the market growth, the industry has to rely on their design & development team to produce valves with respect to the customer needs.

SOLIDWORKS offers the industry to have a technology to design & validate simultaneously for their real time flow problems. The SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation is used to simulate the fluid flows along your valve designs. As a designer, you can decide to make changes with great visualization of the fluid flows.

The following important challenges addressed are like:

• Back Pressure
• Pressure Drop
• Cv Calculation
• Cavitation Effect
• Valve Efficiency Calculation

This technology enables the valve testing for different scenarios in a virtual environment, to build and analyze solutions for the occurring problems to have a safer service and quality at your side. The flow simulation offers the user to apply different sets of boundary conditions for pressure, volume, temperature, mass & velocities at the Inlets & Outlets.

Once the prediction of the flow impacts are done, the user can view exact flow results with the cut & surface plots on the design setup. By adapting to the technology, the growth of the organization can be seen by reducing the prototype costs & have a development of their own products.

SOLIDWORKS Solutions for Furniture Industries

Consumers are looking for furniture that are multi-purpose and technology-driven products specifically to meet individual requirements quickly at low cost. This has made design an important aspect in furniture industries to provide innovative, quality products and services that represent preferred solutions to customer needs.

Challenges Faced in Furniture Industries

• Increased design cycle time and time to market
• Reusable/convertible and modular design
• Interference detection
• Product quality and performance
• Over engineering and scarp reduction
• Product visualization

How to address these challenges

• Design cycle time and time to market can be reduced by design automation
• Ergonomic design and Design interference check
• Product quality and performance can be increased by identifying stress concentration zone.
• Weight reduction and load carrying capacity determination
• First time right design approach
• Product visualization through photo-realistic rendered image 

SOLIDWORKS Solution

• SolidWorks Built-in intelligence accelerates your design process thereby reducing the design time and time to market, the intuitive 3D design puts your focus on innovation and to adapt new market trends
• SolidWorks simplifies advanced surface design to create sophisticated and ergonomic design with complex shapes much easier

• With SolidWorks Design Automation tools like Driveworksxpress and SolidWorks API, designers can improve performance and generate infinite variations of a model.

• SolidWorks interference tools help you verify whether your designs will fit and assemble, further interference checking finds issues early in design, giving you more time to make cost efficient models.
• Design optimization Tool suggests alternatives to offset the material cost and Optimizes design for size, weight and efficiency
• SolidWorks Visualize enable you to create photo realistic renderings and animations right from the 3D CAD model that can be used to enhance proposals, presentations, and submissions  

SOLIDWORKS 2016 SP 3.0

MAKE GREAT DESIGN HAPPEN

SOLIDWORKS has launched a new Service pack update of SOLIDWORKS 2016. Check out, the all new SOLIDWORKS 2016 SP 3.0

Service Pack Highlights: 

• License Transfer Command Changed to Deactivate
• Icon Color Options 
• Interface Brightness Option 
• Enhanced Icons in the Feature ManagerDesign Tree 

Visit the link below to explore the SP 2.0 release document.
http://files.solidworks.com/Supportfiles/Release_Notes/2016/English/relnotes.htm

Contact us for more info on what’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2016:
http://www.egsindia.com/solidworks-2016/index.html

ROLE OF INTERFERENCE AND COLLISION DETECTION IN SPM INDUSTRIES

Special Purpose Machine (SPM) is widely used for special kind of operations, which are not economical on conventional machines. It is designed for getting higher accuracy at desired condition. A design engineer has to improve existing manufacturing technique by implanting new ideas like Special Purpose Machine (SPM). The company’s decision making is based on the motives of improving existing manufacturing processes which result in to major advantages like, reduced manufacturing lead time, tool profiling methods of processing and consistent results on a long run.

TECHNICAL CHALLENGES FACED IN SPM SECTOR

• Unable to determine collision & interference between parts
• Top down assembly modelling
• To showcase physical working of machine
• To create and validate mechanisms involved
• Creating innovative concepts
• Design collaboration of standard components like motor, linear guide ways, pulleys, power packs etc…
• Design and validation of structural elements
• Design communication and approval

These are few of the Technical challenges faced by the SPM sectors during their design process. Let us quickly have an overview on how Interference and collision detection plays major role in these sectors.

INTERFERENCE DETECTION

• Interference Detection identifies interferences between components, and helps you to examine and evaluate those interferences.
• Interference Detection is useful in complex assemblies, where it can be difficult to visually determine whether components interfere with each other.
• SOLIDWORKS tools help you verify whether your designs will fit, assemble, and operate correctly before you assemble any parts. Interference checking finds issues early in design, giving you more time to make cost efficient fixtures.

BENEFITS

• Determine the interference between components.
• Display the true volume of interference as a shaded volume.
• Change the display settings of the interfering and non-interfering components to see the interference better.
• Select to ignore interferences that you want to exclude such as press fits, interferences of threaded fasteners, and so on.
• Option to include interferences between bodies within Multibody parts.
• Option to treat a subassembly as a single component, so that interferences between the subassembly's components are not reported.
• Distinguish between coincidence interferences and standard interferences

COLLISION DETECTION

• The software can detect collisions with the entire assembly or a selected group of components
• You can find collisions for either the selected components or for all of the components in an assembly.
• Collision Detection accelerates the design process, saving time and development costs, and increasing productivity.

BENEFITS

• Physical Dynamics is an option in Collision Detection that allows you to see the motion of assembly components in a realistic way
• Dynamic Clearance Verification mode - Focused on ensuring clearance at all times
• Interference or clearance checks in either 2D or 3D
• Stop with audible warning when collision occurs when dragging/moving a component
• Local or global checks within a design to find all interferences

Flow Simulation

Check the Product Manufacturability at the Design Stage

DFM stands for Design for Manufacturing. The good Design practice is not only focusing on the Product design alone, but also its producibility or manufacturability. It is most important to detect and eliminate mistakes before the product or part goes to manufacturing.

SOLIDWORKS has an inbuilt DFM tool called DFMXpress that helps in implementing common manufacturability checks related to machining and sheet metal fabrication. It helps to avoid downstream problems early in the design stage, thereby reduces cost and minimizes time to market.

DFMXpress reduces engineering changes (ECNs & ECOs) by predicting manufacturing problems early in the upstream design stage. It ensures that the design is compatible with available or desired manufacturing process and can be manufactured economically. This allows potential problem to be fixed in the design stage which is the least expensive place to address them. The design of the component can have enormous effect on cost of manufacturing. DFMXpress plays a vital role in bringing down the manufacturing costs.

SOLIDWORKS Solutions for Piping Design

SOLIDWORKS Routing Solutions give ample set of tools for creation of Pipe, Tube and Electrical route Designs. Piping Industry deals with complex routing lines, that are difficult to be predicted and Serviced. Design of these Piping Systems is also a tedious job, for the design engineer. 

SOLIDWORKS Automates the Way of Piping Design with solutions like Auto-Routing Capabilities and Dedicated Routing Library with Reusable Components like Flanges, Fittings, Equipments and Pipes of Different standards.

Piping Solutions from Solidworks:

• Easy to Create 3D piping system designs, just by a 3d sketch
• Auto-route capability & Designs can be easily edited according to assembly and service needs
• Automatically generate piping manufacturing drawings from 3D models
• Different Connections like butt welded, socket welded, threaded, and other connections are  available
• Calculate cut lengths for all pipe and tube runs
• Automate placement of supports and hangers for all lines
• Share Output PCF files to other Softwares
• Export tubing/piping bend tables to CNC benders
• Automatically create bill of material (BOM), cut lists, bend tables, and other manufacturing documentation
• Access a CAD library of piping and tubing components
• Creation of custom piping/tubing components through the Routing Library Manager wizard