Dynamic Balancing of Machinery
When: February 7, 2-3pm EST
What: Webinar
Rotating imbalance is a common source of vibration. In this webinar you will learn how to simulate this imbalance on rotating components using SolidWorks Motion. This imbalance can be graphed out over time or cycles. Design changes can be implemented using SolidWorks configurations, and the effect of these changes can be studied by duplicating studies.
To register for this free event, Click Here.

An Introduction to the Simulation Suite in SolidWorksWhen: February 17, 10 – 11am EST
What: Webinar
Do you constantly face engineering challenges and product quality issues? Are you fighting a lot of ECOs and warrenty battles? If so, come join us on a one hour introductory presentation on how to leverage functionality within SolidWorks that have helped a lot of companies score in these areas. Learn how much traditional analysis has progressed, and how it is no longer a specialist’s forte, but a tool that every engineer should have and use.
To register for this free event, Click Here.

Surfacing – Advanced Modeling TechniquesWhen: February 21, 9 – 10am
What: Webinar
Have you already mastered the basic SolidWorks modeling tools? Are you looking to take your modeling skills to the next level? Sign up for this webinar to break down the mysterious wall of surfacing modeling and learn practical tricks that you’ll be able to utilize on a daily basis.
To register for this free event, Click Here.

Solving Valve Problems using CFDWhen: February 28, 10 – 11am EST
What: Webinar
Join us for a webinar where we explore how to build a virtual flow bench to monitor the above parameters right inside SolidWorks. Leveraging the power of configurations and easy flow setups, the audience will learn how to determine these critical values in hours without building a single prototype.
To register for this free event, Click Here.

3DVision Technologies is committed to providing engineers, designers and their design teams with the products and solutions needed to design some of the world’s greatest products. For more information on 3DVision Technologies full suite of products and solutions visit us at www.3dvision.com or call us at 1-800-745-3136.

Carrie Patrick
Marketing Manager
3DVision Technologies ]]> http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2012/01/26/3dvision-technologies-february-webinar-series/feed/ 0 http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/12/21/beam-elements-in-simulation/ http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/12/21/beam-elements-in-simulation/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 21:27:50 +0000 breuss http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/?p=4258 One of the things that we emphasize in our Simulation Training classes is simplifying the model. It’s an easy concept to understand – the simpler the model, the faster you’ll get results! For designs that use SolidWorks’ weldment functionality, Simulation will automatically make one of the most significant idealizations of a model. 3-D geometry is idealized into a 1-D finite element for the mesh, a Beam element.

Here is a simple example where two standard c-channel structural members come together at what could become a welded joint (left side). Notice how Simulation has automatically meshed the structural member with beam elements (right side)! In Simulation 2012, you now have the option to render the beam mesh on the structural member geometry – a welcomed enhancement!

In Simulation, the purple spheres represent the ‘joint’ where the two or more beams are connected. There are also options for each beam’s end condition –rigid connection, hinged connection, etc.

How should you handle the automated power of Simulation with weldments? I say ‘handle with care’! Let’s assume that you have one of these c-channels as a simply supported beam – fixed at one end with a load applied at the other. The standard, cantilever beam that we all know and love from our Engineering studies! Recall that the deflection of the end of the beam is calculated by the following equation:
Deflection = (F * L^3) / (3 * E * I)
Where F is the force acting at the end of the beam, L is the length of the beam, E is Young’s Modulus for the beam material and I is the Moment of Inertia for the cross section of the beam.

This is valid, assuming the beam has a uniform cross section throughout its length. What if there are holes cut through the beam? In this scenario, the cross section of the beam is not uniform throughout the length – which is a critical assumption for the deflection of a simply supported beam. In this scenario, Simulation does not recognize the holes and still meshes the structural member with a Beam element.

In my opinion, you have two options for proceeding with the analysis. The first option is to recognize that using a Bea for the structural member is not an accurate representation of the model, but proceed with the analysis to obtain a baseline result. If this particular structural member does not significantly contribute to the overall strength of the model, you may choose to proceed based on these results. The second option would be to treat the structural member as a solid body. With this method you will obtain more accurate results with your analysis, especially if the structural member contributes to the overall strength of the model.

So the next time you’re reviewing your analysis results, be sure to review the assumptions made by both you and by Simulation. Once you’ve verified that all of the assumptions are valid, or at least that you can accept them, you will be well on your way to making sound decisions based upon your Simulation results. Now go make your products better with SolidWorks Simulation!

What is Section 179?Essentially, Section 179 of the IRS tax code allows businesses to deduct the full purchase of qualifying equipment and/or software purchased of financed during the 2011 tax year. That means if you buy (or lease) a piece of qualifying equipment, you can deduct the full purchase price from your gross income.

What Software Qualifies?
For basic eligibility, software must meet all the following general specifications:
- The software must be financed or purchased outright.
- The software must be used in your business or income-producing activity.
- The software must have a determinable useful life.
- The software must be expected to last more than one year.

Section 179 does come with limits – there are caps to the total amount written off. For more specific details visit www.section179.org

The bottom line is, if you are thinking of purchasing software, now is a great time to take advantage of the tax benefits.

Carrie Patrick
Marketing Manager
3DVision Technologies ]]> http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/12/07/section-179-deduction/feed/ 0 http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/12/02/4231/ http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/12/02/4231/#comments Sat, 03 Dec 2011 02:25:04 +0000 rsimmons http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/?p=4231 Streaming video for the entire “What’s New in SolidWorks 2012″ is available from our website!!
If you weren’t able to make it to one of our many local live events or you would like to pass it on to your colleagues to review, it is available here:

http://www.3dvision.com/video/solidworks2012/WhatsNewSolidWorks2012.html

Enjoy !

Fatigue is the localized structural damage that occurs due to cyclic loading conditions. Fatigue also has cumulative effect on a structure – once damaged, always damaged. If the loads applied to the structure are high enough, microscopic cracks will appear on the surface of the part, eventually leading to a failure. Knowing the loading conditions (and, thus, the stresses that occur in the structure) and the number of expected cycles the product will see during its lifetime allows us to determine if our product is safe for the expected life of the product. If the stresses are high, the number of loading cycles the product can withstand are reduced. If the stresses are low enough, the product will have ‘infinite’ life. This stress level is usually referred to as the fatigue limit or endurance limit – a stress level that can act on the material without causing failure due to cyclic loading.

After conducting a static analysis study on the design, right-click on the Results Folder and select “Define Fatigue Check Plot”. The Fatigue Check Plot will be available if the static analysis used solid elements, shell elements or a mixed mesh with solid and shell elements. The calculations for a Fatigue Check Plot are based on an infinite number of constant amplitude cycles (loading events) acting on the product. Let’s take a look at the typical Fatigue Check Plot setup.

When creating this plot, there are several options. Under ‘Modifying factors’ the first is the loading type. You specify ‘ON/OFF’ loading, where the loads are applied and completely removed or ‘Fully reversed’ loading, where the full load is applied in nominal and reversed polarities. The second option is the Surface Finish Factor – surface finished can positively affect fatigue life (shot peening) or negatively affect fatigue life (electroplating). The third option is Loading Factor where you are specifying the loading type the material is experiencing; axial, bending, torsion, etc. The ‘Material’ section of the Fatigue Check Plot property manager allows for additional control of the results. You can enter values from 1 to 100 for ‘Scale this value’ and values from 1 to 10 for ‘Minimum safety factor’. ‘Scale this value’ multiplies the fatigue strength of the material by the scaling factor entered. ‘Minimum safety factor’ divides the fatigue strength of the material by the factor entered. Finally, what’s really nice is the preview of the results during the setup – for the (finished) plot above, we see the green check mark for the selected options and the caveat that you probably do not need to be concerned about fatigue in this design.

In this second plot, I have modified the loading conditions from ‘ON/OFF’ to ‘Fully reversed’ and obtain a warning that the design may possibly fail due to fatigue. I also receive the suggestion to run a complete Fatigue Analysis study on the design. Areas of concern on the part are shown in red on the finished plot.

So the next time you are wondering if your product will last forever, create a Fatigue Check Plot as a first step in analyzing the fatigue life of your design. If your initial results for a Fully Reversed, As Forged, Torsional Loading with a Minimum Safety Factor of 5 is in the green, take that victory lap and high-five your co-workers! Now go make your products better with SolidWorks Simulation!

Just a few weeks ago SelectTech GeoSpatial’s Advanced Manufacturing Facility Technical Team in Springfield, Ohio launched a successful test flight of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS).

The UAS was designed and built with SolidWorks and a Dimension 1200 3D printer. This is the first non-government built aircraft of its kind.

The aircraft has a wingspan exceeding 4 feet and weighs 5.3 pounds. Best part, it was made entirely from ABSplastic. Powered by an electric motor and lithium polymer batteries, it flew in winds in excess of 25 knots. The pilot, Jad Lowrey said, “it took off very smoothly and handled well even in high wind”.

The aircraft was designed and engineered by Frand Beafore, Executive Director of SGAMF, and Beth Galang, Chief Designer. Galang indicated “this design and build system revolutionizes the product development process – not to mention speed to delivery”.

The initial flight trials were made at the Springfield-Beckley airport under The Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) flight rules.

The combination of the amazing design team at SelectTech and the supported solutions of SolidWorks and Dimension 3D printing is a great example of how anything is possible.

For more information on SelectTech, visit their website at http://www.sgamf.com/

Carrie Patrick
Marketing Manager
3DVision Technologies ]]> http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/10/26/successful-flight-of-unmanned-aircraft-system/feed/ 0 http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/10/25/solidworks-tip-of-the-day-complete-list/ http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2011/10/25/solidworks-tip-of-the-day-complete-list/#comments Tue, 25 Oct 2011 20:03:19 +0000 jtadic http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/?p=4090 If you come to this blog to learn tips and tricks, you’ve just hit the jackpot. Have you ever noticed those little tips in the lower right hand corner of the ‘SolidWorks Resources’ tab of your task pane? Have you ever clicked the ‘Next Tip’ link a countless amount of times because you just couldn’t get enough?

Well, this is quite a spoiler to anyone that wakes up in the morning overwhelmed with curiosity of what each day’s SolidWorks tip is going to be, but here’s the complete list. Just be aware that this list was pulled from a 2012 installation, so there is exclusive 2012 SolidWorks functionality referenced in some of the tips.  Enjoy all 163 of them!

Back in the summer of this year, during a SLUG meeting (SolidWorks Louisville User Group - think Louisville Slugger - the wooden bats are still made right here, believe it or not), someone asked how they might quickly transfer a part from one part template to another. So not only do you update the Units settings, for instance, but everything else saved in the desired template as well.

One of the SLUG members, Brandon Bibelhauser, came up with a solution to use ‘Insert Part’ to accomplish this. (click here to see his detailed solution) I tried this on a few sample parts and it works well. If you have experience with this, good or bad, we would love to hear about it.

I’m sharing his solution  because 1) I think it’s great and 2) to encourage you to be a part of your local SWUG chapter – not only can you walk away with swell ideas like this one, but there is always free food and prizes! Look up your local chapter here and get involved.

The “problem” that I want to address in this blog is the inability to do this in a TABLE.
When you are editing a cell in a General Table on a SolidWorks drawing, you only get the “Formatting” toolbar and not the property manager that you need to apply a border around a portion of the note.
So you just can’t do it, right ?

Here is the workaround…
Somewhere else on the drawing make a NOTE, and place the borders as you would like them to look in the table. While you are still editing the note, select all the text, and do a CTRL+C (copy), then to edit a cell of the table and CTRL+V (paste). There you go !!

You can of course go back and delete the note you had to make to get this. The text in the cell of the table IS editable, just don’t delete the portion with the border or you will have to do the note trick over again to get it back.

This is a LOT easier than trying to make a “custom symbol” in your symbol library…

Let’s consider a material from the Simulation material database. Alloy Steel has the following properties (numbers rounded):
Young’s Modulus – 30 x 10^6 psi; Poisson’s Ratio – 0.28; Mass Density – 0.278 lb / in^3; Yield Strength – 90 ksi

What will happen to the Finite Element solution if one material property varies? I’m going to start with a simple model in tension and apply Alloy Steel as the material using the default property values. Then I will change Poisson’s Ratio and re-run the study several times in order to compare the displacement and stress results. Recall that Poisson’s Ratio is a measure of the lateral strain to longitudinal strain for a material, or E_lat / E_long (pretend the E’s are Greek epsilon’s). Poisson’s Ratio is relevant to the linear elastic portion of the stress-strain curve and is unitless. One thing to note, if you do not define Poisson’s Ratio for a material, Simulation will assume that Poisson’s Ratio is equal to zero. There is a pop-up warning, too, just in case you forget to enter a value. Note that if you do not have Poisson’s Ratio for a material, 0.3 is a good initial estimate. But definitely exercise all of your options to find out the correct value for your design materials.

For a ½” square bar, 4” long, I have fixed one end and applied a 10ksi force at the opposite end, putting the bar in tension. After running the analysis with default material properties, I set a baseline with Trend Tracker. After creating several custom Alloy Steel materials, varying Poisson’s Ratio from 0.0 to 0.5, I re-run the analysis with each custom material. Trend Tracker will record the details for maximum displacement and stress in the model.

As you can see from the chart, the Von Mises Stress results vary approximately 16 ksi and the displacement results vary 0.00006 inches. As percentages, this is a 28% variation in stress and a 1.2% variation in displacement. I don’t think most of us would be concerned with 1.2% variation in our models, but 28% is an entirely different matter! I did, however, choose the model with this purpose in mind. The high stresses are at the fixed end at the sharp corner – something most Engineers would avoid in their designs. Now that a 28% variation has your attention, let’s look at a more practical model.

This is a simple bracket, a modification of a part in the SolidWorks Essentials manual. I’ve applied a fixed boundary condition to the bolt holes in the base and a normal force to the counter bore face. I’ve repeated the rest of the analysis, just like the square tensile bar, including using Trend Tracker and varying Poisson’s ration from 0 to 0.5.

For this “practical” model, the Von Mises Stress results vary approximately 4,300 psi and the displacement results vary 0.0006 inches. The percent variation in this model is 5.8% for stress and 6.6% for displacement. If you’re designing for a large Factor of Safety, less than 6% variation in your stress results are not significant. Using SolidWorks Simulation, however, most of us are designing for the lowest acceptable Factor of Safety in order to save the maximum amount of money possible on material costs. In this scenario, a 6% variation can be significant!

So the next time you’re analyzing that awesome design, consider reviewing the sensitivity of your analysis by varying a material property or two. Now you’re armed with powerful information you can share in your next design review. Material property variations from your vendors are no longer an issue! Now go make your products better with SolidWorks Simulation!