Thank you, Richard Wand (MJ Engineering – http://mjengineering.com/) for showing this cool trick!! And thank you Tony Tsao (SolidWorks Corporation) for reminding me to blog about this after the Simulation Tips and Tricks Webinar!!
In numerous instances, I have had the need to revisit some of the conditions that I set up on a simulation study. For instance, going back and checking what I applied on one bolt!! Or checking the value of a pressure load that I set up on the model. Usually, the quickest way to do this would be to right click on the item in the simulation tree, and select Details. This would pop-up a window that shows the definition of that item.
What is cool is the fact that you can lock this pop-up window down using the push-pin on the top right corner of the window.
Thereafter, clicking any entity on the simulation tree would bring up its corresponding definition in the pop-up window. Try doing this by walking through some of the items you have already set up in your Simulation tree (such as connections, external loads, fixtures, etc.).
Another way of getting a quick summary of any portion of the pre-processing is to generate a report and choose to only include a specific item (such as external loads) in the report. Publishing the report would list out all the external loads that were setup in the study.
Remember: Reviewing boundary conditions is a necessary step before running the analysis, and when troubleshooting erroneous results!!
Jimmy: I always try to attend the 3DVision “What’s new” presentations, but this year I wasn’t allowed to go. Isn’t it interesting that companies offer tuition reimbursement but won’t let you take a half day to attend a What’s New presentation? They’d pay for me to take a pottery class (as long as I get a “C” or better) but they won’t help me keep my SolidWorks skills current?
Take this man Jimmy. Jimmy is the top gun engineer at his company. Last night Jimmy’s IT department upgraded his SolidWorks installation from SolidWorks 2008 to 2009. Let’s watch to see how much faster Jimmy is with the new upgrade.
Without the AssemblyXpert, you are pretty much left to manually find the problem. I typically suppress every part but the first fixed part, then unsupress each part one at a time keeping track of every mate and external reference as I go. Move the parts (sometimes temporarily suppressing mates) check your design intent…is everything working as it should? Then, if you are lucky, when you get to the part that contains/or is causing the circular references you’ll notice things aren’t quite right -fix the issue and then hope you are done. Else start the process over again!
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