Thankfully, by using SOLIDWORKS’ equation capabilities, it is possible to fully define your sketch and model geometry and establish relationships and constraints through equations. This is particularly useful in engineering, as many systems rely on ratios and dynamic relationships that change depending on specific geometric characteristics.

Say for example, you are designing some kind of fluid nozzle. Maybe you would like your nozzle outlet to have a diameter that changes with regard to a specific inlet diameter or even some value for pressure.

In SOLIDWORKS this is pretty easy. You can even define the value for pressure at the inlet and have the outlet diameter change when you rebuild the model. These features can allow you to evaluate various design options without having to manually redesign your model each time you wish to change a parameter. We won’t go that far in this article. We will just look at designing a basic shower head, and we will link the dimensions to a set of basic equations.

Equations can be used to drive both sketch geometry and model geometry. For both cases, they work in a similar manner. Let’s take a look at how to drive sketch geometry with equations.

Equations, Global Variables and Dimensions

Let’s start by looking at how to input dimensions and equations. First, go to Tools > Equations.

On clicking Equations, you should notice a new window pop up, titled Equations, Global Variables and Dimensions.

This is where most of the equation action will take place. Let’s have a look at this in a little more detail since we will be using it later.

Global Variables

Global Variables can be used to drive equations and dimensions. Say for example, you were designing a pipe and wanted the pipe length to remain relative to some other dimension—maybe your pipe has some length constraints relative to its installation location.

You could name a Global Variable as “PipeLimit.” When you go to create your actual pipe, you can define the pipe length in terms of a fraction of that limit in the equation field. Whenever you make changes to your pipe, it will remain within the allowed boundaries.

If it somehow breaches that boundary, then you can use the Feature section to suppress the pipe if it gets too big.

Tutorial Time!

Everything in SOLIDWORKS begins with a sketch. So, this is where we will begin this tutorial.

First, sketch two concentric circles of diameter 100mm and 90mm.

Now comes an important step. We need to define these dimensions with the Smart Dimension tool so that the Equations functions will recognize them.

With the sketch still open, go to Smart Dimension, click it and click the outer diameter of the circle you just drew. Name it as “Outer.”

Do the same for the inner concentric circle and name it “Inner.”

Now they are defined and named with the Smart Dimension tool. When you go to Tools>Equations and open up the Equations, Global Variables and Dimensions panel (shown below) and click the Dimension View tab (circled below in red), you will see that the Dimensions section has been populated with the Smart Dimensions from the sketch.

OK, let’s open the same sketch back up and draw two more concentric circles inside the other two. Let’s convert these circles to construction geometry—right click on the circle sketch and select the Construction Geometry icon. Don’t worry about the precise diameter. We will have these new diameters driven by our global variable later. Just be sure to use the Smart Dimension tool and rename them as D1 and D2.

Now, sketch two little circles, one on each of the construction circles that we just sketched. Use the Smart Dimension tool and rename them “OuterHole” and “InnerHole.”

Next up, create a Circular Pattern of these new holes. Create four equally spaced instances so we end up with eight holes.

That will do for the sketching. We can now go ahead and extrude the sketch entities.

Firstly, extrude the outer ring—the contour area in between the sketch elements we named as “Inner” and “Outer”—as you can see below. Extrude it to 10mm.

Next, extrude the inner area (the base) ensuring that you don’t accidentally extrude/fill the eight little circles up. Extrude that base area to 3mm. If you’ve followed the steps correctly, then your final solid shape should look like the image below.

The Equations and Global Variables Bit

OK, now we have our solid created from a Smart Dimensioned sketch. All of those dimensions are now visible in the Equations, Global Variables and Dimensions panel. Since they are all visible in that panel, we can now start linking them up and making them a little more dynamic and responsive to our design changes.

This is the part where we transform the solid from a dumb model into a smart model.

Let’s have a recap of what is now visible in the Equations, Global Variables and Dimensions panel now that we have populated it with the Smart Dimensions.

At this point, if we click on any populated field in the Value/Equation column, we can change the value in that field. Our sketch (and solid) will respond to that change. You will notice that not only are the sketch entities in the table, but the boss extrusion feature dimensions also have appeared.

Even though our model is still relatively dumb, you can automatically see the value of having all of your dimensions collected in one place like this. From this panel, we can literally just find a parameter we wish to change and do so, safe in the knowledge that the model will update to reflect those changes on rebuild.

It sure as heck beats opening up different sketches and manually editing them every time we want to make a change.

For example, if I want to change the number of instances in the circular pattern, I simply click the Value/Equation field for the CircularPat@Sketch1 entry and increase or decrease it as I see fit.

In this example, I want to change the number of holes to 12. I change the CircularPat entry to six because we are actually patterning the two original holes, so 2 x 6 = 12. Keep this Circular Pattern thing in your minds. We will be making this into an equation-driven value later.

Let’s start to add the Global Variables. Open up the Equations, Global Variables and Dimensions panel again, and in the Global Variables section, add a new Global Variable named “OuterDiameter” and type the value of “=100mm” in the corresponding Value/Equation cell. Be sure to use the equals symbol (=) when entering values here.

Now create a second Global Variable named “HoleDiameter” and set it to 8mm.

Beneath that, create a new Global Variable named “HoleArea.” Now we can start to use some formulae. We want to define the individual hole area in terms of the diameter so that it’s equal to pi multiplied by the radius squared.

In the HoleArea value cell, we can enter this formula as =PI * (HoleDiameter).

You don’t have to actually type HoleDiameter. You can just click the Global Variable name or select it from the drop-down menu while typing the rest of it.

Now that these Global Variables are added, we can refer to these when defining the dimensions or creating equations. They are now magically stored in the software somewhere and can be recalled when linking to values.

For example, we wish to link our OUTER@Sketch1 value to the OuterDiameterGlobal Variable.

We can do this by simply deleting the original value of 100mm from the OUTER@Sketch1 value field and clicking the cursor in the empty cell. You will see a list appear in a pop-up menu showing various options, including to insert a Global Variable.

In this case, we want to link the OuterDiameterGlobal Variable to the OUTER@Sketch1 dimension. You can see this in the image below.

Now that we have those Global Variables defined, we can use them as a benchmark to create relationships with the other sketch and model entities. We can do this with equations.

Equations

Entering equations in SOLIDWORKS is fairly easy. There’s no need for any deep programming knowledge. It’s comparable to entering equations in a spreadsheet.

Imagine that you are designing some sort of fluid system and wish to maintain a specific total area for the holes for the fluid to pass through, and you want that total area to remain constant regardless of the diameter of each individual hole. To put it another way, we want the number of holes to change and maintain a constant total area.

Let’s say we want that area to equal 2,400 square millimeters. This will be our target value. We can treat this as a constant, so we create a new Global Variable called “TOTALholeAREA” and set it to 2,400, as you can see in the image below.

Next, we want our number of holes to change in order to maintain that total area, regardless of the diameter of the holes. We create a final Global Variable called “HolesNeeded” and add a little formula for that.

The number of holes will be equal to the total combined area of all of the holes divided by the individual hole area. Since we want an integer value, we can use the “Round” function to round it off. In the Holes Needed Value/Equation cell, we can use the syntax =ROUND (TOTALholeAREA / HoleArea) to return an integer value. Remember to add the parentheses after the ROUND command to tell the software to perform that function on whatever is inside the brackets, just like your spreadsheet program.

Now we want to have the output of that formula drive one of our dimensions. Specifically, we want to have that output drive the number of instances in the circular pattern.

Following the same procedure from before, where we assigned Global Variable values to dimensions, we simply click the adjacent cell to the CircularPat@Sketch1 dimension and link that to the HolesNeeded variable. We divide that by two, as you can see below.

Why are we dividing it by two? Because we have two sets of holes: one on the outside, and one on the inside.

Now Test!

That’s it. It’s all done.

Now you can go ahead and test it. If you’ve followed the steps correctly, you can change the values for hole diameter in the Global Variable section and the model will update the number of holes needed to maintain a constant area.

It could be useful for designing a shower head, injector system or anything where you might like to maintain a constant flow while varying the number of holes. Of course, there’s a lot more to fluid dynamics than that. You can link all kinds of variables and equations. It’s all down to your ingenuity, and patience.

You can see how our new smart model responds to changes in the video below.

Both the Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift S are less expensive than their predecessors from Oculus, coming in at around $300 each.

The Oculus Quest contains its own GPU, so there is no need to buy a VR-capable PC to run it, and the Oculus Rift S is a cheaper version of the original Rift but with a few improvements. You will need a VR-capable PC to run the Rift S, but again, at $300 for the headset, there is now a lower financial barrier to entry.

So, to celebrate this apparent dawn of low-cost VR, we will take a look at SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2019’s VR capabilities.

Recap

You may recall, in previous articles we did a tutorial on creating animations in the Visualize Professional 2019 Car Simulator, and we also took a look at the rendering capabilities available in Visualize Professional 2019.

In this article, we will build on those previous articles and show you how to make a little 3D VR video. So, you might find it helpful to go back and read the car simulation article if you haven’t already done so, as we will assume some basic knowledge of that feature in this article.

Camaro

Alrighty, then. We are going to use the Camaro model that comes with Visualize Professional, because it’s pretty and we think it will look nice in the VR with some light bouncing off it.

So, go ahead and load up Visualize Professional 2019, and then load up the Camaro model. Just load up the software, go to Sample Projects, and load up the Camaro1969 project, which is shown in Figure 1.

For our demo, we will be using a nice outdoor background, so go ahead and navigate to the File Libraries pane on the right-hand side of the screen, select Environments, then select Cloud. Our HDRI image is in the cloud library.

Once you have done that, scroll down the tiles and locate the Industrial Lot HDRI file and either double-click it, or drag it into the 3D Viewport.

If you’ve done that correctly, then your scene should look a little something like what is shown in Figure 2. Remember to go to the Appearance tab, select the Industrial Lot tile, go into Advanced, and select the Flatten Floor setting to ensure that the car is sitting on a flat surface.

You can play around with the part appearances if you like. We have changed the paint to a Chameleon Pink color, which is found in the Vivid Metallic Paint appearance library.

At this point, the scene is looking a bit dark still, so we can add a few lights and play with the camera bloom settings to get the scene looking a little brighter.

Hey, Dawg, We Heard You Like Neon…

Now would be a good time to look at the emissive materials available in Visualize Professional.

We’re going to put some neon tubes all over this ride, because hey, dawg, we heard you like neon. This gives us an excuse to look at the bloom settings on the camera and also direct modeling within the Visualize environment.

First up, you’re going to want to model a neon tube.

To model basic shapes in Visualize Professional, simply go to the model browser pane, right-click in the Model Sets area, select New Model, and then choose a Cylinder (see Figure 3).

You can then go to the Transform tab and scale your cylinder about the three axes so it more closely resembles the proportions of a neon tube.

Next, you will want to mate the tube to the underside of the car, so that it travels with the car during the animation.

To do this, simply select the cylinder from the model browser pane, navigate to the Transform tab, scroll down to the bottom, and locate the Follow/Mate button (see Figure 4). The mating system is vastly simplified compared to SOLIDWORKS proper.

All you have to do is ensure that the cylinder is selected, position the cylinder where you want it on the main body, click Follow/Mate, and then select the body you wish to mate it to. In this case, we want it mated to the 1969 Camaro body. There. The cylinder is now mated to the body of the car.

Emissive Appearances

Finally, we want to add some glowing materials to our now-mated tubes.

This is easy to do. Simply head to the Appearance tab, right-click in the appearance area where the other appearances are displayed, and click New Appearance from the menu (see Figure 5).

Now, go into the Appearance Type menu and select Emissive, as shown in Figure 5. We have boosted the brightness a little. From here, you simply drag and drop the new emissive appearance onto your tubes (see Figure 6).

Now, in order to get the light from those tubes bouncing off the floor, we will need to change the floor reflections of the environment a little, though not too much: these settings can dramatically affect GPU performance when it comes to rendering!

To add some reflections to the floor, simply navigate to the Scenes pane, click the current (Industrial Lot) environment tile, go into the Advanced section (see Figure 7) and nudge the Floor Reflection up to 0.04. We don’t want to go too high, or else it will make the road surface look like it’s been raining. We can boost the roughness up a little, and if you have a powerful GPU, you can boost the caustics. Be warned, though, when it comes to rendering for VR, you need to render a very high resolution. And that will take time.

As you can see in Figure 8, the floor reflection is done.

Now that we have a bit of glow coming out from underneath the car, we can add a few more emissive materials to the rest of the car to create some headlights and taillights.

To achieve this, simply repeat the emissive appearance process that you did previously. Just create a new emissive appearance, and drag and drop it onto the headlights (see Figure 9).

This is not the most realistic method, but unfortunately, there is not currently a method for mating a spotlight or directional light to the car body. We hope SOLIDWORKS will take note of this need.

We want movable light bars and directional lights for animating police chases!

VR Time

OK, now that we have got our car set up to look a bit prettier, we can start positioning the cameras for the VR rendering work.

We can render both still images in 360 degrees and also animations.

Let’s start with a still image.

First, go to the Camera tab and create a new camera. Then right-click, select New Camera, go in the General tab, and select 360 from the Type menu (see Figure 10).

You can now position the 360 camera in the scene by using the shortcut keys or the sliders in the Transform tab.

Bear in mind that you will only see a single image when the real-time render view is set to Preview mode. To see the actual panoramic view, you will need to select Fast, Accurate or PowerBoost. You can see the resulting panorama in Figure 11.

The 360 camera can be programmed to follow a motion path, or it can be left static. If you want to learn how to set motion paths for cameras, take a look at our previous article on Visualize’s car simulator.

In our demo, we have opted to leave the camera static, and we have used the physics simulator to control the vehicle around the camera. Again, refer to the previous article to learn how to control the vehicle.

After recording the vehicle motion into the physics simulator, the simulation will be sent to the animation timeline, and you will be ready to begin rendering.

Rendering the 360 animation into video follows the same procedure as a normal video—except it takes a heck of a lot longer because you are rendering at a much higher resolution (and also some glowing pink lights in this case).

To begin the render, open the Output Tools menu from the top ribbon (see Figure 12). Then select the movie option from the icons on the left (it’s the one with the little clapper board).

Be sure to check the Adjust for Virtual Reality playback box, as this will provide you with a list of VR ready resolutions, all set to a 2:1 aspect ratio, which is what you need for 360 panoramic playback on a VR headset.

Clicking the Render Options tab will allow you to select from the default VR resolutions, starting with a minimum of 4K resolution and increasing from there.

For our demo, we actually disabled the VR playback option just to achieve a quicker render. We manually inputted a 2K resolution with a 2:1 aspect ratio, and we also decreased the render passes down to 200 passes per frame.

After a whopping 15-hour render, you can see the results below. So much for “quicker”!

You will notice in the video that there is a lot of noise on screen, especially around metallic areas with a lot of reflection. This is because we had the render passes turned down.

When rendering a professional VR video, you may wish to boost the number of passes quite a lot.

For an 8K render, with 500 passes, for 20 seconds of footage at 25 FPS, it would have taken almost a week to render our demo video.

You may also notice the pink neon is quite prominent—distractingly so. Always perform a test render before committing to a full render first, kids!

After this tutorial, you now have an idea of how to create your own VR videos using SOLIDWORKS Visualize Professional. And, as you can see from the full resolution still images, if you have plenty of GPU power lying around, you can make some pretty amazing and photorealistic animations when you crank the settings right up.

Of course, if you don’t have weeks to spare for rendering, or if you don’t have a super powerful GPU, then you can always use SOLIDWORKS Visualize Boost and outsource some of that rendering to a second machine. This is the exact type of job it was made for!

If you’d like to see more VR goodness from SOLIDWORKS Visualize, and what a moving camera looks like, you can watch the video of a private jet walk-through in the video below.

Until next time…adieu!

However, as a guitarist and long-time SOLIDWORKS user, I have been following Lithuanian guitar company Lava Drops since we interviewed them during the launch of the firm’s Kickstarter campaign back in June 2016.

Since then, Lava Drops has been touring the world and showing off its wares to professional musicians, it has built a custom guitar for Jack White of The White Stripes fame, and just recently, the company’s founder visited SOLIDWORKS World 2019 with a new guitar designed especially for the event.

So, with all these recent developments, we figured it would be a great time to catch up with Lava Drops founder Rapolas Gražysto see what’s new in the world of Lava Drops guitars.

But before we do, let’s just have a recap of what Lava Drops is all about.

The guitars in the Lava Drops range are crafted from a variety of exotic materials and woods for the body, neck and inlays of the instruments. Such exotic materials have included actual pieces of cooled lava, (hence the name, Lava Drops). Add to that an aircraft-grade aluminium trim, and you have some very exclusive-looking instruments, which are far removed from the Fender and Gibson clones that have dominated the market for decades. They are both inspired by natural forms and give a nod to modern technology.

And did we mention they have lasers on them too? Yes, as an optional extra feature, you can get a laser MIDI controller fitted on your guitar, so you can control a range of effects and noises by manipulating the laser beam with your hand. Cool stuff!

Who doesn’t like lasers?

Heck, who doesn’t love MIDI controllers? Monsters and Luddites. That’s who!

xDesign Edition

So, cracking on with the article. First up, we wanted to know about the custom guitar that Lava Drops designed for SOLIDWORKS World 2019 (you can see this beauty in Figure 1).

Figure 1. Lava Drop X, a custom job for SOLIDWORKS World 2019. (Image courtesy of Lava Drops.)

“Lava Drop X, the xDesign Edition, is based on the usual Lava Drop X model shape, but as it was specially created for SOLIDWORKS World 2019, it had some custom-made options,” explained Gražys.

“It is a futuristic musical art piece handcrafted using neck-through technology in a combination of Lithuanian Maple, Sapele wood and aluminum contour. These precious materials connect the past and the future and create unimaginable resonance and fascinating sustain.

“Aluminum contour reveals high frequency, and enlarges the instrument’s sustain, making this instrument sounding very clear. The fingerboard is crafted from Ebony wood. A special aluminum “X” inlay is encrusted into the fingerboard. This custom instrument is painted in the Dassault Systémes blue color and signed with the 3DEXPERIENCE symbol.”

As you can see from Figure 2, Lava Drops designers aren’t just using SOLIDWORKS for the design, but are also making good use of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform for their product lifecycle management (PLM) needs.

Figure 2. Designing with 3DEXPERIENCE. (Image courtesy of Lava Drops.)

Jack White III Signature Edition

So, how does a company grow from a Kickstarter campaign to creating a signature series guitar for one of the world’s most renowned guitarists in the space of less than two years?

Figure 3. Jack White, his signature guitar and Rapolas Gražys. (Image courtesy of Lalo Medina, Monotone, Inc.)

There has to be a cool backstory attached to the development of this special guitar. Indeed there is!

“It was a totally mind-blowing and one of a kind experience,” explained Gražys.

“Jack White had a world concert tour last year and he had a concert in Lithuania. I was invited by the organizers to create a special custom gift from all [the] people [of] Lithuania who appreciate Jack's music. After two months of creating and three months of building this instrument, finally I met Jack and showed him the guitar, the Lava Drop Jack White III.

“He was totally astonished and I was very happy meeting the legend and holding the guitar.”

Figure 4. The Jack White III. (Image courtesy of Lava Drops.)

The Jack White III has been designed all around the number 3, because, according to Lava Drops, it defines most of the aesthetics in the world. Consequently, the company selected three different wood species to craft the instrument, with each coming from three different continents.

Add to that, and you have three boutique vintage-sounding Haeussel mini-humbuckers, 3mm of aluminum surrounding the sides of the body to boost sustain as well as reinforce the body, and three colors blending into a unique aesthetic.

In addition to Jack White, Gražys has met a whole bunch of other iconic guitar players throughout the whole Lava Drops experience.

“I had privilege of meeting one of my guitar idols who has tried and appreciated—and has said fantastic words about Lava Drops—the one and only guitar legend Tommy Emmanuel.

“It was a great experience meeting him in person and listening to how he shreds the Lava Drop.”

Emmanuel is an Australian acoustic guitarist, known for his finger style technique that was heavily influenced by Chet Atkins. Indeed, Emmanuel even teamed up with Atkins to create an album together. He has also been voted the best acoustic guitarist on a couple of occasions by Guitar Player magazine.

As well as finding fans of Lava Drops guitars overseas, the luthier and design company is generating some fans on its home turf.

“At the moment, one of the most well-known musicians in Lithuania, Andrius Mamontovas, is playing and using the Lava Drop X model.”

Future Innovations

So, all seems to be going well for Lava Drops. The company’s range is expanding, and it is gaining new fans.

So, what is next for the company?

“I am really interested in the new way of using rare materials for musical instruments,” said Gražys.

“I have already created the Black Amber Drop guitar that was crafted from 50-million-year-old amber.”

You can see a video of Steve Morse (from Deep Purple) test-driving the aforementioned Black Amber Drop guitar in the video below.

“At the moment, I am creating another guitar that will be created from a very, very rare material, and it will be presented I hope this year, as it takes a lot of work to design, create and craft the instrument.”

Mysterious! What could be more rare than amber, we wonder? Well, there are lots of rare materials, but they have to be machinable, so they can be shaped into a guitar.

Dinosaur bone maybe? With a chunk of meteorite machined for the contours? Or how about some million layer Damascus steel? There are a fair few possibilities.

But for now, Gražys isn’t saying what the material will be. Some things are best left as a surprise perhaps.

“Just follow Lava Drops social media and subscribe to Lava Drops newsletter,” he says.

“We have a lot of going on there!”

Indeed they do, and you can follow Lava Drops on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or if you’d like to get your hands on one of these instruments, then you can check out the company’s range and order one from the Lava Drops website, over at this link.

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

The CubeSat standard, which was developed by Stanford University and California Polytechnic State University in 1999, defines the specifications required for a CubeSat.

For example, the basic CubeSat, as defined in these standards, consists of a single unit called a “1U” that measures 10cm x 10cm x 10xm. Larger CubeSats are available, and they are built up from multiples of this singular unit. That is, a 2U CubeSat is two 1U units, a 3U is three standard units, and so on.

CubeSats can be launched directly from a rocket as a shared payload, or they can be otherwise deployed from the International Space Station(ISS) via a special piece of hardware called a deployer.

In August 2018, three of these 1U CubeSats were deployed from the ISS, after having hitched a ride on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 a couple of months earlier.

The three CubeSats were part of the Birds-2Project, which is an initiative led by Kyushu Institute of Technology (Kyutech) in Japan.

The Birds CubeSat project is aimed at providing technology and knowledge transfer to developing space nations, and Birds-2, as you might guess from the name, was the project’s second iteration.

In this second iteration of the Birds project, three nations were responsible for the design and manufacture of the small satellites: the Philippines, Bhutan and Malaysia.

The three CubeSats are named Maya-1, which was designed by students from University of Philippines Diliman; BHUTAN-1, from Bhutan University; and UiTMSAT-1, from Universiti Teknologi MARA in Malaysia.

Figure 1. Maya-1 flight model.(Image courtesy of JAXA.)

We spoke to Filipino engineer Joven Javier, who along with colleague Adrian Salces was responsible for the design of Maya-1 while studying satellite design at Kyutech.

“The Birds project aims to provide knowledge of CubeSat development as a platform for educational proliferation. It provides local students with knowledge of mission design and systems design, which will help to cultivate local talent in space technology,” said Javier.

“I spent two years on a master’s program at Kyushu Institute of Technology, where I received training on CubeSat development. Now I have returned to the Philippines, where I can share this knowledge at DOST-ASTI and UP Diliman.”

DOST-ASTI (Department of Science and Technology/Advanced Science and Technology Institute) is a Philippine government agency, which along with University of Philippines Diliman has been instrumental in developing the Philippines space capability—not only assisting with the development of Maya-1, but also with designing and constructing two larger microsatellites named Diwata-1 and Diwata-2 (the latter having been launched in 2018).

Maya-1, and the other Birds-2 satellites are equipped with a variety of payloads the students designed.

Each satellite includes:

• 2 cameras. Two identical cameras with two different lenses are installed on each CubeSat for the purpose of capturing images of the engineers’ home countries.
• Automatic Packet Reporting System Digipeater (APRS-DP). This system can receive text messages from amateur radio operators here on Earth, and can broadcast the messages within the coverage area of the CubeSat.
• GPS chip tech demonstration. This was a newly developed piece of hardware designed to demonstrate low power operation capabilities in space.
• Single Event Latch-up (SEL) monitor. Space radiation is a hazard for satellite electronics, and high energy particles from space can cause SELs as they pass through the satellite’s electronic hardware. The SEL monitor logs such events.
• The onboard magnetometers are used to measure the magnetic field in space and compare it with the one measured on the ground.

A variety of software was used in the development of Maya-1 and the other Birds-2CubeSats.

“The aluminum CubeSat structures were designed using SOLIDWORKS,” said Javier.

“The software was integral in not only designing the hardware and structural interfaces, but was useful in communicating the ideas with the team.”

Figure 2. Maya-1's aluminum structure. (Image courtesy of Joven Javier.)

Not only was SOLIDWORKS useful for the actual CAD modeling, but the team also found value among its other features.

“Now that I have returned to the Philippines,we have started to experiment with SOLIDWORKS Visualize for our knowledge sharing sessions at DOST-ASTI, where I create presentations to help explain the CubeSat to my co-workers. In addition, we plan to use the videos and renderings from Visualize for promotion and outreach purposes. Some of our colleagues plan to use the renderings for their lectures in the new microsatellite track ofthe Electrical Engineering postgraduate course at UP Diliman as well.”

Maya-1 animation.(Video courtesy of DOST-ASTI.)

The new course that Javier mentioned will be starting at UP Diliman in January 2019, and is part of the STEP-UP project, which stands for Space Science and Technology Proliferation through University Partnerships. The initiative is designed to empower local engineering students with space technology through lectures and workshops. The curriculum will include lectures on CubeSat development at UP Diliman, as well as an exchange with Kyutech, where Filipino students will gain hands-on experience with space environment testing methods and equipment.

The STEP-Up project aims to launch two CubeSats per year.

“The Birds project has helped us to learn how the satellite bus system is designed in a 1U CubeSat. With this knowledge transfer, we are currently developing the next-generation CubeSat project in the Philippines at UP Diliman, which will be focused on bringing more of the design and manufacturing back home.”

So, as you can see from the new course at UP Diliman, the Birds project is already achieving its goal of propagating space technology to developing space nations. And that’s a good thing!

We look forward to bringing you news of Maya-2—or some variant of the theme—in the not too distant future.

Ad Astra!

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

If you’ve answered YES to any or all of those questions, then buckle up, because Visualize Professional in SOLIDWORKS 2019 has got an awesome new feature that you will want to learn about.

Figure 1

Yes gearheads, the latest release of Visualize Professional has a physics-based driving simulator, which you can control with an Xbox controller (or motion path) and create beautiful, photorealistic animations of your car simulation.

This new feature, which is the first of its kind in CAD, is aimed at automotive designers. It’s promising an easy workflow to assist designers with bringing their creations to virtual life, enabling designers to show how their designs will look in the physical world, before having to cut a single piece of metal (or sculpt a single lump of clay, as is the case in the automotive concept world).

In this article, we are going to show you the basics of how to get started with that very task! So, if photorealistic car animations are your thing, then read on.

Getting Started

First up, you’re going to want to start your Visualize Professional software.

Once it is loaded, you should click on the Sample Projects tab to see the sample models that are available to you. You can see how that screen looks in the Figure 2 below.

As this is a driving simulator, we are going to need a set of wheels, and luckily there is an example of some pure American muscle available for you to play with in the sample projects tab.

Go ahead and click the 1969Camaro.svpj icon to open it up.

Figure 2

After you have opened up the Camaro project, then you will be presented with the following screen. This is the main work area of Visualize Professional, and most of your work will be done from here.

Figure 3

Let’s familiarize ourselves with the work area and find out how to navigate before we move onto the simulation and rendering stuff.

Obviously the main area in the middle is your viewing area, where your 3D model is displayed. You can orbit, zoom, pan, and do all the other things that you are used to from the main SOLIDWORKS program. We are going to assume that you already know how to navigate the 3D space in SOLIDWORKS, so there is no need to belabour the point here.

At the very top of the screen, we have our Visualize options, such as File, Edit, View, Project, Tools and Help. This, naturally, is where we load and save our projects, access commands such as Undo, Copy, Paste, add windows to our viewscreen, and access tools such as Snapshot, Render, and Help.

As we want to be animating this thing eventually, we want to add the Timeline to our screen. So go ahead, click View, and then click Show Timeline from the drop-down menu.

The timeline will appear at the lower portion of the screen, as you can see below.

Figure 4

SOLIDWORKS users will recognize this type of timeline from the SOLIDWORKS animation and motion study features. It is a keyframe-based system, exactly the same as in SOLIDWORKS proper. We will look at the timeline in more detail later.

Now, cast your eyes to the top-right-hand side of the screen. You will see five icons on tabs, as you can see in the figure below.

Figure 5

These icons, from left to right, allow you to access the Models, Appearances, Scenes, Cameras, and File Libraries respectively. These icons are fairly self-explanatory, so we will look at them in more depth as we use them though the article.

First, let’s add a Scene. Click the Scene tab, and you’ll see a bunch of backgrounds appear in the right-hand panel.

Double-click the Route 66 icon in the Environment section, and you will see an HDR scene appear in the background, as seen below. You can see more about how to alter the scene and lighting over at this link.

Figure 6

Now that the scene is set, click the Models icon, and click the entry for 1969 Camaro beneath it to open up the model options panel, as you can see below. Now you can see four tabs visible. Go ahead and click the Physics tab, to show you the options for your simulation type in the drop-down menu.

Naturally, we wish to simulate driving a car, so go ahead and select Car from the Simulation Type menu.

Figure 7

Clicking on the Car Simulation Type will open up the Vehicle Setup driving simulation menus. At last!

This is where the fun begins.

As mentioned earlier, Visualize Professional features a physics-based engine, and can add mass, gravity, and motion to your simulations, and the 3D bodies in the simulation will respond to these physical parameters.

The best part of the Driving Simulation is that SOLIDWORKS have added actual vehicle dynamics to the software, so you don’t have to worry about the nightmare of coding vehicle behaviour yourself. Anyone who has worked in vehicle dynamics will know what a major chore that would be!

The result is an easy-to-use, intuitive GUI that bears more resemblance to a videogame (such as the Forza Motorsport series on Xbox) than it does to an actual simulator.

Actually, Forza Motorsport is way more complicated to use, when you really get into it.

Vehicle Setup Parameters

OK, so we have opened up the Physicstab, we have selected Car as our Simulation Type and we can now see the Vehicle Setup options. It’s quite a long panel, so we have cut it in half and displayed each half side-by-side, just for the sake of the article aesthetics.

Figure 8

As you can see in Figure 8 above, we have options to change the mass, acceleration, maximum torque, maximum RPM, drive wheels (FWD, RWD or AWD), brake wheels and steering wheels.

These default values are not befitting a 1969 Camaro, so we will change those values to something a little more accurate.

So we change the values to:

Mass: 1500kg

Acceleration: 1

Peak Torque: 610 Nm

Maximum RPM: 6000

Drive Wheels: Rear

Brake Wheels:Front

Steer Wheels: Front

The next section of the Vehicle Setup options shows the Advanced Properties. We will leave these as the default values for this article. Anyone with experience in vehicle dynamics knows how tweaking these values can have profound effects on the handling of the car…so we will leave well alone!

But just as a summary, these Advanced Properties will change the steering, shock absorber travel, wheel friction, camber angle, and all of those lovely complicated things that will dynamically affect the ride comfort, fuel consumption, and even stability of the vehicle (in real life). Feel free to play with these parameters for yourselves though.

Nearly Ready…

Right, then. Our car parameters have been defined. We just have a couple of little items to help define the simulation, and then we are ready to go.

Scroll back up to the top of the Vehicle Setup panel and locate the Driving Behaviour and Vehicle Wizard buttons.

Figure 9

Vehicle Wizard

The Vehicle Wizard allows you to define the moving parts of your vehicle for the animation and simulation. Here, you can assign parts of your model that will move, such as the wheels and callipers.

We can also set up the direction of travel of the vehicle, because we want it driving forward (+X direction) and not skidding sideward.

You can assign the parts manually, or you can use the automatic function. For the case of this article, we will just select Automatic Mode, and click Next.

You should now see the following image on your screen (Step 1). Go ahead and assign the direction of the vehicle, and click Next.

Figure 10

Now, you should see Step 2.

You can see in Figure 11 below that the software has assigned the wheel parts automatically. If you are happy with the setting, click Next to advance to Step 3.

Figure 11

The final step (Step 3) assigns the parts of your model as callipers.

Figure 12

Now your callipers are set, go and click onApply. Congratulations…your car now has wheels and callipers assigned, and the simulation will recognize those parts as such.

Driving Behaviour

The Driving Behaviour options let you determine how your car will be controlled in the simulation.

We can see four options here. These are:

Controller: This allows you to control with an Xbox controller or the WASD keys.

Turn: This will make the car turn in a circle (no input required)

Straight: Self explanatory

Path: This allows you to specify a path using waypoints in the Path Propertycontrols.

Before we explore these motion options, we will need to open the Simulation Manager. This is at the very bottom of the Vehicle Setup panel, as you can see back in Figure 8. Go ahead and click it, and you will see the following panel appear to the right of the timeline, as you can see below clearly in Figure 13:

Figure 13

If you select Turn orStraight in the Driving Behavior options, and click the PLAY icon in the Simulation Manager, you’ll see your car drive in a circle or straight line respectively. Easy enough, right?

If you want to use the Controller option, or the Path option, it’s a little different.

Go ahead and select Controller from the Driving Behaviour menu.

Controlling the Car Manually

OK, you’ve selected Controller. Now the car is ready for manual input. Now click the PLAY icon on Simulation Manager, and the car will accept your inputs.

Press your W key to go forward, the A key to steer left, D key to steer right, and the S key to reverse. The Q key will activate the brake, and E will activate the handbrake. Just like a video game.

Now, if you want to record the motion (which you definitely will, if you want to render it later), you will need to go onto the timeline, and drag the red bar to the time value that you want, depending on the required length of your animation. You can see in the image of the timeline below, we have dragged the red bar to the 5 second mark. So our simulation in this case will be 5 seconds long…this method is very similar to animating in SOLIDWORKS proper.

Figure 14

Next, you need to press the red RECORD icon in the Simulation Manager to record your inputs.

Go ahead and click the record button, and move your car around with the keyboard or your Xbox controller. When you have finished driving around, click the square STOP button in the Simulation Manager, and you will notice that your timeline has populated with yellow bars, representing the motion of your vehicle components, and their physical position with respect to time.

Figure 15

If you look at the left hand side of the timeline, you will notice another set of icons, similar to the Simulation Manager. You can see another PLAY button here. Go ahead and click that, and you’ll see the simulation played back in the main window.

Figure 16

The bars in the timeline represent the entirety of your simulation/animation.

Let’s go ahead and render it, to see what it looks like.

To access the render settings, you can either go to the menus at the top and select Tools > Render, or else you can go to the panel above the main viewscreen and select the little camera aperture icon, as seen below.

Figure 17

This will bring up the Output Tools menu. Output Tools will allow you to render still images, animations, perform Sun studies, or even put your model on a turntable, just like at a motor show!

In this case, we would like to test render the animation.

So, locate the Animation icon (indicated by the green arrow in the image below.

Now we can see two tabs…one for Animation Options and one for Render Options.

The Animation Options will let you set the file format for your rendered video (we selected MP4) as well as the output directory for your finished file.

The Render Options tab will let you set the quality of the rendered video.

When you are happy with the settings, go ahead and locate the Start Animation Render button at the bottom of the panel, and click it.

Depending on your hardware capabilities and the quality of render, this might take a while.

As we have only selected Preview quality, it doesn’t take long.

Figure 18

You can see our little test render in the video below.

So, those are the basics of manual control, the Simulation Manager, and rendering the animation using the Output Tools.Let’s take a look at using waypoints to create a motion path.

Creating a Path

Head back over to the physics panel on the right-hand side and select Driving Behaviour > Path.

You will see a new set of options (Path Properties) appear underneath, as you can see in Figure 19 below.

Figure 19

Click on Create New Path Point and you will see a white square with a number 1 above it in the main viewing area. Click it again, and you will see a second square appear, with a number 2 above it, as you can see in the image below. You can add as many as you like. When you click the PLAY button in the Simulation Manager, your car will follow the path.

Figure 20

If you wish to edit your path into something a little more curvy, then you can do so by clicking the Object Manipulation Tool in the tool bar just above the main viewing window, then clicking on a waypoint. You will see a transform axis tool appear on the selected object, and you can move it by dragging one of the colored axis handles, as shown below.

Figure 21

You can click the PLAY button on the Simulation Manager to check that your path is looking OK, and when you are ready to record the animation, simply press the RECORD button on the Simulation Manager. Just remember to hit STOP when the path course has been completed, or else it will keep recording in the timeline and you’ll end up with a really long video.

When you are happy with the animation, you can render it out as we did before.

You can see the results in the video below. We have increased the render quality in this video.

That’s All, Folks!

So, in this tutorial, you have learned how to start a project and how to navigate both the software interface and the 3D space with your model.

You now know how to start a simulation, and change the vehicle dynamic characteristics, as well as change the environment scene.

You can control your vehicle with both the keyboard/controller method, and using waypoints, and you also know how to render the video using the Output Tools menu.

Is there anything else? YES! We didn’t show you how to set up the cameras…but setting up cameras properly is beyond the scope of this article, and sadly that’s all we have the time and the space for. And besides, this is an engineering website, not film school! We can show you the basics, but composition and creativity is down to you!

Fortunately, Hawk Ridge Systems have made a video showing you the basics of setting up a camera, which you can see over at this link.

We have hopefully shown you the basics of setting up a simulation, and rendering it into a nice video. Go ahead and experiment yourselves and see what you can come up with.

That’s what we’ve been doing anyway. We had no idea how to use this feature until 2 days ago…

But if that proves anything, it demonstrates how easy it is to make videos for showing off your vehicular creations in the latest release of Visualize Professional.

So go forth and make some sweet videos. Feel free to share the links with us in the comments below.

We would love to see your results! It’s quite likely that you can teach us a thing or two as well!

Until next time…adieu!

Ship hull construction geometry. (Image courtesy of William Sutherland, The Shipbuilders Assistant.)

As technical drawing standards became more standardized, the shipbuiliding industry was at the front of the queue, eager to implement the new methods. Conversely, when CAD became widely adopted in the 1980s, the shipbuilders were again at the forefront, ready to swap their French Curves for Bezier Curves.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that today’s shipbuilders are using SOLIDWORKS to assist with their designs. Here are a few examples of how SOLIDWORKS is used today in one of mankind’s oldest engineering domains: shipbuilding.

Kvichak Marine/Vigor

Seattle-based boat builder Kvichak Marine—now named Vigor after a successful merger—has been recognized for decades as a worldwide leader in the design and construction of high quality, hardworking aluminum vessels. Their designs range from small pilot boats, such as the 23 meter long Astoria pilot boat, all the way up to huge research vessels.

Astoria pilot boat. (Image courtesy of Vigor.)

As you can imagine, working on such complex projects generates a lot of paperwork and inventory. Kvichak Marine was quick to investigate the possibility of achieving a paperless factory when they heard about it.

Every boat built at Kvichak is custom. It seems that you get quite a lot of options when you have a few million bucks lying around to spend on a boat. This high degree of customization means that every design generates its own documentation and requires tracking across the entire product lifecycle.

Every single part on every single Kvichak boat is catalogued in SOLIDWORKS and Enterprise PDM.

Of course, good documentation practices aren’t just key to the success of running a paper-free operation. In many cases, Kvichak deals with a lot of emergency services and other governmental agencies. A pristine electronic paper trail is a requirement when applying for tender to these projects. Failure to comply means that Kvichak doesn’t win the contract. It’s as simple as that.

Aside from the 3D modeling capabilities within SOLIDWORKS, Kvichak found a way to cut down on construction time by designing mark lines into the 3D models of the aluminum structural parts. When the parts were manufactured, they would have the digitally precise marks transferred to the real-life parts via the manufacturing process, enabling quick assembly before welding.

Not only has Kvichak managed to go paperless, they have successfully gone tape measureless now that their parts are manufactured with the measurement guides embedded in the part.

Dixon Yacht Design

Southampton, United Kingdom, has a rich maritime history dating back to at least Roman times. Just because the city and culture is steeped in maritime tradition, it doesn’t mean that the local engineering companies aren’t moving with the times.

Dixon Yacht Design is one of the leading manufacturers of luxury yachts in the world. Their vessels sell for tens of millions of dollars—we don’t have the exact price at hand. Like most high-end engineering products, the prices are not displayed prominently on their website. It’s safe to say that the old adage, “if you have to ask, then you can’t afford it” definitely comes into play as far as super yachts are concerned.

Catamaran yacht (Image courtesy of Dixon Yacht Design.)

“We were limited by how far we could take a solid model with our previous software because it lacked the detail we needed for the computer numerical control (CNC) machining our clients use. We had to move the design back and forth between 2D and 3D applications,” said John Oates, Dixon yacht designer. “SolidWorks allows us to finish the boat design and check it for accuracy in one application. That gives us the flexibility to be more creative in how we approach different design challenges.”

All of these benefits means that Dixon Yacht Design has been able to slash 25 percent from its design time.

Westport Shipyard

Of course, there’s no point dropping the equivalent of a small nation’s GDP on a boat if it doesn’t look amazing inside as well.

Westport, Wash., is home to Westport Yachts. Not only is Westport Yachts one of the largest manufacturers of luxury composite yachts, but it also knows a thing or two about luxurious interior design.

Luxury interior rendering. (Image courtesy of Westport Yachts.)

Westport Yachts boats have tens of thousands of components in them, especially mechanical and in the interior. While these boats are tailored to the customers’ wishes, they also share some common platform elements. That is why Westport Yachts has been taking full advantage of SOLIDWORKS configuration features.

“The ability to have models in production on a continual basis, while using configurations to provide customers with choices and options on different parts of the boat—such as variations on the state room design—makes us more efficient,” said Taylor Olson, engineering manager. “It also has a positive impact on profit margins. The impact of SolidWorks software is felt not so much in terms of development time but in supporting a more cost-effective production paradigm that gives us an advantage in terms of time-to-delivery.”

Boat interior. (Image courtesy of Westport Yachts.)

And, of course, they make full use of SOLIDWORKS’ rendering capability, allowing them to show their bespoke interiors off to their discerning customers before they buy their boats.

Shipworks

We have taken a look at the results of using CAD in shipbuilding. Now, let’s take a look at some of the tools that can aid with ship design.

There are various add-ins for SOLIDWORKS that are tailored to streamline the design process for various different disciplines. Those working in ship design will be pleased to know that there is an add-in for shipbuilding.

Shipworks, from Portuguese CAE software company Althima, provides ship designers with a suite of tools aimed at optimizing naval vessel design workflows.

Shipworks not only allows users to design in 3D before exporting 2D drawings in nautical-friendly formats, but it also combines the industry-specific data from Shipworks with the FEA capabilities of SOLIDWORKS Simulation to run structural simulations optimized for ship design.

Althima is a SOLIDWORKS Certified Solution Partner. You can read more about their shipbuilding add-in at this link.

There we have it. Technical drawing has come full circle and returned to its shipbuilding roots. CAD is making shipbuilding faster, better and cheaper. But is that it? Is there anything else that technology can bring to this ancient engineering domain? Of course, since processes can always be improved.

Do you work in shipbuilding? What improvements to modern CAD packages do you think could help in your ship design workflows? Let us know in the comments below.

The automotive design and manufacturing process in Industry 4.0 is highly digital, and it is increasingly accessible to stakeholders across the entire manufacturing chain via the magic of product lifecycle management (PLM) systems.

This month’s industry-specific collection of case studies will take a look at how the automotive industry is making use of SOLIDWORKS solutions across the product life cycle.

APS Helps to Build the New Ford GT40s

Fans of motorsports, classic cars and even racing videogames will recognize the car shown in Figure 1. The Ford GT40, which was designed in the 1960s as an endurance racing car, won the Le Mans 24-hour race on four consecutive occasions in the years spanning 1966-1969. 

Figure 1. A GT40 replica. (Image courtesy of APS.)

 The original GT40s are very rare and worth their weight in gold, so you’re unlikely to own one, but the good news is that there is a company in Australia that builds replicas of the models, which have been optimized for the 21st century, with 21st-century design tools.

Automotive Performance Solutions (APS) was founded in 2004 to provide engineering support and solutions to the GT40 owner market and has expanded to designing and building its own replica cars.

“Unlike other replica or antique car companies, our approach is to design and build an entirely new version of the GT40 without disrupting the classic body shape,” said Ivan Viduka, APS business development manager. “Our customers get the performance of a modern underbody—including the drivetrain and suspension—combined with the classic period interior and exterior components that they love.”

To bring its GT40s into the 21st century, APS has utilized a variety of design tools, including SOLIDWORKS.

“For example, our chassis are hand built and riveted together,” Viduka noted. “Using the Hole Wizard in SOLIDWORKS, we don’t have to spend time measuring and indexing holes to space rivets and attachment points, as the software accurately enables tolerancing checks and uniform spacing of hole locations.”

In addition, APS has made the most of the simulation environments in the software.

“We can leverage the dynamic motion, interference detection and FEA analysis tools of SOLIDWORKS Premium software to increase the assembly accuracy and meet our performance targets for both components and assemblies.

“Integrated simulation tools in SOLIDWORKS Premium also enable us to conduct the structural checks, such as natural frequency and fatigue analyses, that minimize prototype iterations,” Explained Viduka.

The combination of these features has allowed APS to cut design cycles by 50 percent and decrease assembly time by 40 percent, resulting in a 30 percent reduction in development costs.

Ford Manages Tolerance

Tolerance is fundamental not only to the functioning of automotive components, but can also cost big bucks in the manufacturing stage if it is not managed correctly. It is estimated that up to half of scrap and rework can be attributed to poor tolerance and variation management.

Figure 2. The Ford Flex. (Image courtesy of Ford Motor Company.)

Ford Motor Car company understands this and has employed third-party software plug-ins to help keep track of tolerances.

To perform the tolerance and assembly build analysis on components and assemblies, Ford uses Varatech’s SigmundWorks software, a Certified Gold Product for SOLIDWORKS, which means it is completely compatible in that CAD environment.

With SigmundWorks, Sigmund ABA and SOLIDWORKS, engineers at Ford are able to check new designs from global suppliers and staff engineers for in-car entertainment systems, including DVDs, CDs and radios. Once the functional intent and build objectives of a design have been verified with the software, tooling can be released.

Measure twice, cut once, as the old phrase goes. But with software such as SigmundWorks, why stop at merely measuring twice?

To evaluate quality, engineers at Ford run thousandsof what-if scenarios at a time, tweaking dimensions, tolerances and variations at will.

For example, on one occasion, Ford’s engineers were assessing the tolerances within a CD player, and they set the tolerance software to run a scenario involving a warped optical disk. The tolerances were found to be too small to accommodate disk warpage, which would have resulted in disks jamming. And so, the CD player fittings were redesigned to allow for such warpage.

Better to redesign a part early on than to issue a product recall after it hits the market!

And thanks to third-party plug-ins, these design bugs can be identified easily and addressed before they turn into major and costly headaches.

JL Racing Simulating and Modeling

Figure 3. JLE race car rendering. (Image courtesy of JLE.)

JL Racing Products (JLE) is the leading manufacturer of racing cars in Brazil, having designed race car systems for a number of prestigious racing events.

Although JLE has been dependent on CAD for quite a while, it started off using 2D platforms such as AutoCAD, and only switched to the SOLIDWORKS 3D platform in 2007.

Since then, the company has managed to shorten design cycles by 70 percent, cut race car suspension weight in half, reduce the number of prototypes tenfold, and decrease chassis production from 10 days to just four hours. Those are some pretty impressive metrics. What products did JLE use to achieve these engineering miracles?

SOLIDWORKS Simulation plays a large part in the company’s achievements.

“Our cars have to be strong but light, and SOLIDWORKS Simulation tools have enabled us to build faster cars,” said Gustavo Lehto Gomes, engineering coordinator at JLE Racing.

“We conduct linear static stress, displacement and fatigue analyses to reduce weight, increase speed, and ensure safety. For example, the weight of the suspension for the G15 stock car is less than half that of previous models.

“We used to do a lot of prototyping to see how parts perform,” continued Gomes. “Because SOLIDWORKS Simulation lets us see how parts will perform prior to testing, we now make 10 times fewer prototypes. This capability saves us time and money, and enables us to achieve consistent levels of quality from car to car.”

And, of course, don’t forget about the aesthetics! These cars may not be designed for road use, but race cars still have to look kinda cool, right? We’re sure that there is some kind of law that dictates this….

Either way, JLE is making the most out of the SOLIDWORKS modeling features, too, allowing easy creation of the sweeping and curved geometry that goes so well on sports cars.

“SOLIDWORKS surfacing and large assembly design tools have allowed us not only to design faster, safer cars, but also to improve car aesthetics,” said Gomes

In fact, JLE is so smitten with its CAD choice that it has standardized on SOLIDWORKS design, analysis and product data management (PDM) solutions across the whole product life cycle.

Lighter, faster … and more cost-effective.

This is the mantra so common to the automotive industry, and it is one that is being realized by companies that employ SOLIDWORKS in their design and manufacturing phases.

So, we’ve taken a look at how CAD is used at various stages of the product life cycle.

Do you know of any production cars that have been designed entirely with SOLIDWORKS (or other Dassault products)? Maybe some of you have worked in automotive design and have some insider information? If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Let us know in the comments below!

But we tend to look at high-end or experimental projects on this website. In the past, we have looked at space technology, flying cars, jetpacks—things that tend to be out of the price range of most mortals.

So, in this article, we are going to take a look at a few success stories from more common, down-to-earth companies that have been using SOLIDWORKS to design and manufacture products that are more tangible and familiar, with the hope that the next time you come into contact with one of these items, you will have a greater appreciation of how the product was designed.

Leatherman Tool Group

If there is one item you absolutely need if you ever become stranded on a desert island or find yourself facing a zombie invasion, it’s the Leatherman multitool.

Founded in Portland, Oregon, in 1983 by mechanical engineer Tim Leatherman and his business partner Steve Berliner, the company has since grown to become the leading manufacturer of multitools in the world, having sold over 37 million  units since its founding.

Of course, in the old days, CAD systems were few and far between, as were the computers capable of running them.

So the multitool’s prototype, dubbed “Mr. Crunch,” was designed the traditional way—on a drawing board with pencils and a straight edge. You can see the tool’s prototype in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Mr. Crunch prototype. (Image courtesy of Leatherman.)

You will notice that the prototype is manufactured from sheet metal forming processes. The main body of the tool is basically just a piece of metal that is bent into shape. As the company grew, item braced technology and initially made use of the 2D CAD solutions that were available at the time.

But then as the company’s product range grew, and as the products evolved into more complicated forms, Leatherman decided to investigate what 3D CAD had to offer.

“Our product designs require greater use of organic shapes with more curves instead of just square, sheetmetal parts,” said Leatherman CAD manager C.J. Goodrich. “With our previous CAD package, we had neither the capabilities to model intricate shapes requiring 3D splines and curves, nor the complex surfaces required to develop innovative designs.”

So after Leatherman trialed several different 3D products in 2005, SOLIDWORKS emerged as the company’s clear choice.

You can see how SOLIDWORKS allows for the design of organic assemblies in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Assembly mode. (Image courtesy of Leatherman.)

Of course, given the sturdy and rugged nature of the tools it produces, Leatherman makes use of finite element analysis within SOLIDWORKS Simulation to ensure that its tools are capable of sustaining loads when they are applied. And having doubled its annual design output since it adopted SOLIDWORKS, the company has found a new friend with SOLIDWORKS Workgroup PDM, which enables more efficient management of the product lifecycle.

“SOLIDWORKS Workgroup PDM has really opened our eyes to improvements in our manufacturing processes,” said Goodrich. “It allows us to add manufacturing into the process earlier. Plus, we are having great success in using SOLIDWORKS software as the foundation for instituting lean manufacturing methodologies that cut out waste and redundancy during interactions between Design Engineering and Manufacturing.”

Thanks to SOLIDWORKS, Leatherman was able to increase the number of new products it produces annually by 100 percent, as well as reduce product development cycles by 33 percent.

Fender Musical Instruments Corporation

Is there a more iconic music instrument that defined 20th century music than the Fender Stratocaster? We doubt it…but if you can think of one, then let us know in the comments.

When Leo Fender and his pals designed the legendary Stratocaster back in 1954, they had no concept of CAD. As with Leatherman’s products, Fender’s early variants were designed on paper.

As the company moved into the 1980s, it joined the digital age by moving onto 2D CAD platforms. This was all well and good until Fender acquired the Jackson guitar company in 2002. As the guitarists among you will note, the Jackson range contains guitars of significant geometric complexity (consider the Jackson Roswell Rhodes, for example) compared to the more traditional Fender lines, and so Fender decided to invest in 3D CAD software.

Figure 3. Jackson Roswell Rhodes. (Image courtesy of Jackson Guitars.)

“Jackson guitars are a completely different type of guitar,” said Glenn Dominick, senior manufacturing engineer at Fender. “The geometry is complex. We can better address Jackson design challenges with 3D, particularly the neck shape, because its 15-degree angle makes tooling much more difficult to produce. Since there is no efficient way to develop fixtures on those kinds of angles using 2D, we have to use a 3D tool for Jackson guitars.”

While Fender instruments were manufactured by hand in the past, the main product lines (with the exception of their custom builds) are now manufactured by machine, and so Fender was drawn to SOLIDWORKS by the CAM features within the software, which enable repeatability and consistent quality in its instruments.

“Since we began using SOLIDWORKS software, we have been able to complete the most difficult step—developing the neck back shape—30 percent faster,” said Dominick. “That’s just one example of how SOLIDWORKS software is helping us cut time and manual steps from the process. By using SOLIDWORKS software, we have reduced manufacturing time by at least 20 percent across the board, and have boosted production throughput by creating better tooling and taking advantage of better CAM programming.”

With the help of SOLIDWORKS, Fender was able to cut production time by 20 percent across the board, reduce the time required to shape guitar necks by 30 percent, as well as increase its production throughput with improved tooling.

Sub-Zero Freezer Company

Of course, SOLIDWORKS isn’t just great for 3D modeling; it also has simulation capabilities that can greatly reduce the design iteration process. Sub-Zero freezers illustrate the range of SOLIDWORKS features quite nicely.

Like many of these company examples, Sub-Zero previously relied on 2D CAD packages for their design work but decided to move towards 3D to boost efficiency of their design workflow.

Figure 4. Small fridge, big assembly! (Image courtesy of Sub-Zero.)

“We wanted to move to solids because of the potential for greater efficiencies,” said Design Documentation Supervisor Brenda Stewart, who was the CAD administrator at the time Sub-Zero made the transition to 3D. “Improved handling of sheet metal was a big driver in the decision to move to 3D. Working in 2D, we experienced delays and missed some production dates. We believed that by moving to 3D solid modeling, we would be more efficient and gain additional flexibility to support downstream users.”

In addition to the sheet metal functions, Sub-Zero makes extensive use of SOLIDWORKS Simulation to design mounting brackets for hardware inside the units that it designs to ensure that the fastenings are able to withstand the static loads placed on them.

And if you take a look inside most refrigerators and freezers, you will notice a lot of molded plastic, especially inside the lining of the appliances. In the case of Sub-Zero freezers, these molded linings were made more efficiently by using SOLIDWORKS draft analysis.

Since incorporating SOLIDWORKS into its workflows, Sub-Zero has managed to cut its design iteration cycle time in half, as well as shave weeks off its mold development time.

Wolverine Worldwide

You may not recognize the name Wolverine Worldwide Inc. on first glance, but we are pretty sure you have heard of its subsidiary companies.

Wolverine Worldwide is the parent company of a variety of footwear brands, including Hush Puppies, Merrell, Sebago and Wolverine (to name but a few).

As you’d expect with footwear, designing these products requires a lot of curves and organic forms, so product designers at Wolverine Worldwide rely heavily on the surface modeling and deformation features in SOLIDWORKS.

These features are what drew Wolverine Worldwide to SOLIDWORKS in the first place.

“With shoe grading, we often need to utilize a nonuniform scale,” said Wolverine CAD/CAM Manager Chris Petersen. “We experienced some issues working with nonuniform scales in the previous CAD system, which, combined with the price of the software, prompted us to reevaluate our design environment. Wolverine needed a system that was easier to use, had a better price point, and was consistent with our product expansion and productivity goals.”

Wolverine has also designed an interesting innovation in its products, named “Individual Comfort System” (iCS). This system features a mechanism in the sole of the shoe that deforms the shape of the shoe when a wheel in the heel is adjusted. Naturally, this design required a lot of simulation and use of design configurations in order to model each comfort position in the assembly.

“With design configurations, we modeled each shoe position for our iCS footwear from the base design,” said Petersen. “This saved time and let us show the concept completely. We also benefit from the design visualization tools in SOLIDWORKS, including RealView, PhotoView 360 and eDrawings. Every model we create becomes a PhotoView 360 rendering, and eDrawings serve as living blueprints, which we use heavily.”

You can see some of those beautiful renders from PhotoView 360 in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Inner layers of shoe, rendered in PhotoView 360. (Image courtesy of Wolverine.)

Wolverine has shortened its design cycles by 60 percent, cut its development costs by 50 percent, reduced its material usage by 50 percent, and expanded its product line by 200 percent. Those are some impressive success metrics!

So, there you have it. All of these companies have transitioned from 2D to 3D and have used SOLIDWORKS to bring these familiar products into our lives. You can see how these companies have all reduced product development time, saved costs on materials, and shortened the time to market—and, of course, let’s not forget the most important thing—they have all continued to create innovative designs that are attractive to customers.

The next time you are fighting off zombies with your Leatherman, or attempting (and failing) to emulate those Gilmour-esque bends on your Stratocaster, take a moment to enjoy the design and manufacturing aspects that were made possible thanks to 3D CAD!

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

We’ve seen before how SOLIDWORKS has been used to design and develop hardware for use in a range of environments, including land, sea and air.

So, you may be surprised to learn that SOLIDWORKS has been used to develop products for use a little farther from home—for use in space.

In this article, we are going to take a look at a few companies and agencies that have been using various SOLIDWORKS features to help explore the final frontier.

Astrobotic Technology, Inc.

First up in our list of intrepid space companies is Astrobotic Technology,Inc.

Astrobotic was formed by robotics pioneer and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Professor William L. "Red" Whittaker with the specific goal of winning the $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE (GLXP). You may recall that the GLXP was formed to encourage private industry to develop, launch and land rovers on the lunar surface, with prizes paid out to the companies that achieve key technical milestones. Astrobotic, which has been developing the Peregrine lunar lander and working on a lunar robot with CMU, received prize money for three milestones.

Astrobotic chose to use SOLIDWORKS because of the software’s robust visualization and communication, and the fact that it integrates with Mastercam machining software. In addition, many engineers at CMU are familiar with SOLIDWORKS, which made selecting the software a no-brainer.

“CMU is a SOLIDWORKS university, so we all have experience using the software,” said Steve Huber, chief operating officer. “We view SOLIDWORKS as the CAD leader, and the ease of the SOLIDWORKS user interface is important to us. When tools are accessible, members of our staff can express their innate creativity more freely. From conceptual design to rendering to machining, we use SOLIDWORKS for everything we do.”

Rover camera attachment. (Image courtesy of Astrobotic.)

SuccessMetrics

• Selected by NASA as one of three industry partners for development of robotic lunar landing capability under the Lunar CATALYST initiative
• Established itself as the leading Google Lunar XPRIZE team and was selected for three out of three Milestone Prizes, largely based on the strength of its technology development progress
• Developed a variety of robots for space-related uses
• Attracted 18 NASA contracts to date for space robotics development

Alliance Spacesystems, LLC

Remember Spirit and Opportunity? They were the two Mars rovers designed by NASA for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program. The rovers are particularly noteworthy because they far exceeded their anticipated service lives of 90 days. Spirit lasted 20 times longer than was predicted, while Opportunity is still roaming the Red Planet more than 14 years after it landed. That makes the Opportunityrover, which has traveled over 45km on the Martian surface as of January 2018, the longest running space rover ever.

MER rover arm assembly. (Image courtesy of Alliance Spacesystems.)

What does SOLIDWORKS have to do with the MER program? Well, the robotic arm on both rovers was designed and simulated in SOLIDWORKS. The arms contain an array of sensors designed to help the rovers conduct their Martian experiments. Using SOLIDWORKS, engineers at Alliance Spacesystems were able to compress the iterative cycle as well as reduce the weight of the components, which is obviously highly desirable in an industry where the mass budget is the design driver.

Alliance Spacesystems talks about CAD.

“We were searching for every gram of weight, every millimeter of space,” said Brett Lindenfeld, director of engineering at Alliance Spacesystems. “The ability of our analysts to use the simulation software for stress and thermal analysis enabled them to backstop our designers and collaborate efficiently to optimize the design. The team was able to reduce the mass of the robotic arm by 20 percent—the automotive equivalent of the space needed for a car engine and transmission, while keeping rework to less than 1 percent. We were fast but still produced a higher quality, more innovative design.”

Success Metrics

• Selected by NASA as one of three industry partners for development of robotic lunar landing capability under the Lunar CATALYST initiative
• Established itself as the leading Google Lunar XPRIZE team and was selected for three out of three Milestone Prizes, largely based on the strength of its technology development progress
• Developed a variety of robots for space-related uses
• Attracted 18 NASA contracts to date for space robotics development

SE Corp VAB Fluid Simulation

Not all of these stories involve things being strapped to a rocket and fired up into the sky. This case shows how SOLIDWORKS was used to increase safety for those working on the ground in the famous Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

Using SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation, analysis consultancy firm SE Corp was able to simulate what would happen if rocket fuel ignited in the VAB in order to assess the safety and emergency escape procedures at the facility.

Simulating for safety. (Image courtesy of SE Corp.)

By modeling the VAB, SE Corp was able to simulate fuel exhaust gases and ground-level thermal radiation, as well as how various configurations of the VAB would affect an explosion. The company also simulated the effects of the sea breeze coming from the Atlantic Ocean.

“The CFD model predicted where and when these exhaust gases would become lethal in and around the VAB,” said Sean Stapf, founder of SE Corp. “By quantifying the time and severity of structural and personnel exposures to exhaust temperature, velocity, pressure and concentration, NASA could improve safety and emergency response planning.”

Success Metrics

• Completed NASA VAB CFD simulation in just 24 hours
• Shortened solution time with smart elements
• Produced results that helped NASA improve safety planning
• Won NASA’s Space Flight Awareness Team Award

Deutsches SOFIA Institut

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the world’s only flying astronomical observatory, is a collaboration between NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

SOFIA is a repurposed Boeing 747 SP with a giant hole cut into the side for the 2.7-meter infrared telescope to peer out of. The beauty of SOFIA is that it is completely mobile and can be deployed to capture astronomical events that may not be possible with fixed telescopes. Of course, being a mobile telescope means that certain measures are needed to ensure stable operations during flight.

The vibrational and rotational isolation systems, tracking cameras and telescope/tracking system interface were developed by the Deutsches SOFIA Institut, which is based at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. SOLIDWORKS was integral to the development of several of these systems.

You may recognize the interface assembly image that follows—it is featured on the splash screen while SOLIDWORKS 2018 is loading.

Interface assembly for SOFIA. (Image courtesy of DSI.)

“The SOFIA aircraft is constantly shaking and moving, and the telescope systems must perform across a wide temperature and pressure range,” said Jan Drendel, who worked on the interface between the aircraft’s three tracking/positioning cameras and the telescope at the University of Stuttgart. The system is subjected to the California heat when on the ground and temperatures close to -40°C when in the stratosphere. “Using SOLIDWORKS Simulation tools, I conducted linear static stress and thermal expansion studies on the camera/telescope interface components,” explained Drendel.

Success Metrics

• Supported important achievements in astronomical discovery
• Optimized telescope/tracking cameras interface
• Decreased weight of parts by using simulation tools
• Facilitated collaboration and communication across development team

So, there you have it. We have seen four examples of how the space industry is using SOLIDWORKS to reduce weight, compress iteration times and even improve safety for ground crews.

Do you work for a space company or agency that uses SOLIDWORKS to help explore the final frontier?

Let us know in the comments below!

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

Aerofoil Modelling

Before we can start simulating however, we need to design our aerofoil. This is relatively straightforward, as there is a wealth of aerofoil coordinate data libraries online, and we can import those coordinates into SOLIDWORKS by using the Curve Through XYZ function.

For this tutorial, we will be using a NACA 4415 aerofoil.

You can copy the NACA 4415 aerofoil coordinates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne aerofoil database website, or you can obtain it from the AirfoilTools website here. Note, the AirfoilTools site has a nice visualization tool that shows you how the shape of the aerofoil geometry changes as you modify the NACA parameters, which is great if you want to know exactly what those NACA numbers mean.

Excel

The raw coordinates need cleaning up a little before we can import them into SOLIDWORKS.

Open up Microsoft Excel and copy/paste them into the first cell. You will notice that both X and Y coordinates have been copied into a single column, so in order to make them usable we need to separate them into individual columns.

Highlight Column A in Excel, click on Data, and select Text to Columns.

On the first page of the Text to Columns Wizard, we want to select Delimited, if it isn’t already selected by default.  Then click Next.

On the second page of the Wizard, check the Tab and the Space delimiter boxes. This should separate the X and Y coordinates into two columns. Then click Finish.

Now that we have two columns with separated X and Y coordinates, we are going to need to create a third column full of zeros so that SOLIDWORKS can import it. These zeros represent the Z coordinate, but as this is a two-dimensional curve, we have no need for a Z coordinate, and, hence, we set them to zero. Type “0” into the top cell in the third column, and click the little box at the bottom of the cell, or drag the box to the bottom of the data set in order to populate the third column with zeros.

Now we have our X, Y and Z coordinates in three columns. We can click File>Save As and select Text (Tab Delimited) from the drop down menu. Select a location to save the file to, pick a name for your file and click Save.

If an Excel warning appears, just click Yes to ignore it.

You can now close Excel and open SOLIDWORKS.

Loading the Aerofoil Coordinates

Open SOLIDWORKS, open a new part file and on the top of the screen select:

Insert> Curve > Curve Through XYZ Points

This will open the Curve File pane. Click Browse, and then locate the text file containing the cleaned up coordinate data that you exported from Excel. It will load the coordinates into the pane, as seen below.

Click OK, and you will see the aerofoil curve appear in the design window, as seen in the image below.

Of course, being a curve, it is still not useful for creating geometry, so select the Front Plane from the design tree and click Sketch from the Sketch tab.

Now click Convert Entities from the Sketch tab, and in the Convert Entities panel, select the aerofoil curve from the design window.

Next, we want to make a centreline from the trailing edge to just beneath the leading edge. This will represent the chord length of the aerofoil, and once we have constrained it we can alter the chord length at will.

After the chord line is sketched, we need to put another line connected to the last line near the leading edge. This new line needs to be tangential to the aerofoil, as shown below.

Then, we can select both the chord line and the tangent line, and constrain them so that they are perpendicular to each other. Why? Because when we rotate the sketch or extend the chord length, we want it to retain shape, and the perpendicular constraint will ensure that the whole thing remains aerofoil-shaped.

Now that the sketch is constrained, we can just double-click on the chord line and enter a value for how long we want the chord to be. In this case, let’s set it to 1.6 meters.

Congrats! You have now converted your aerofoil curve into a sketch entity. Now we can model our solid aerofoil.

2D to 3D

This part is easy. Simply select the aerofoil sketch and extrude it to 4 metres. This will provide us with a basic constant-chord (i.e., non-tapered), rectangular wing. This type of wing, incidentally, is referred to colloquially as a “Hershey Bar”.

And there it is. Our Hershey Bar wing is now ready for some flow simulation!

Flow Simulation Time!

Load up the Flow Simulation add-in by clicking Tools > Add-ins and checking the SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation box. Once it is loaded, select the Flow Simulation tab and click the Wizard button to start the Flow Simulation Wizard.

On the first page of the wizard (Project Name), name your project and click Next.

On the second page (Unit System), select your preferred unit system. For consistency, we will select SI units here (m-kg-s). Then click Next.

On page three (Analysis Type), we can select Internal or External study. Internal studies are for simulating flows that are constrained by some kind of vessel, such as a pipe, and external studies are for simulating flows around the outside of a body such as a truck or an aerofoil. So, we click External, and then press Next to advance to the next page.

The next page (Default Fluid) allows us to select the fluid in our study. This is an aerodynamic study, so we select Air from the top list and click Add. Once the default fluid has been added, we can click Next.

We can skip over the next page (Wall Conditions) by clicking Next.

The final page that we need to deal with in the wizard is the Initial and Ambient Conditions page. This is where we set the temperature and pressure of the environment and the velocity of the flow in the x-direction. We have set the temperature and pressure to SSL (standard sea level) values and the velocity in x-direction to 55m/s (about 200km/h).

That’s all we need to worry about with the wizard. Click Finish and the wizard will close.

You will notice that the wizard has created a box around the wing. This is our Computational Domain, where all the magic happens. Think of it as the inside of a wind tunnel. Everything inside it is part of the simulation, and everything outside it is irrelevant.

Note that a larger Computational Domain requires more processing.

Click on Computational Domain on the left hand panel (as seen below) and you will notice six handles appear on the box. Drag these handles until the domain box fits just around the wing model. Be sure to leave enough room at the fore and aft of the wing so we can get some sweet visualization of the fluid flow as it passes around the wing.

Next up, we want to set our goals.

The Goals in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation serve three purposes:

1. Defines Design Goals and/or other important criteria
2. Used for Convergence Control
3. Finish the calculation

Being an aerodynamic simulation, we want to set goals that are relevant to this domain. So, go into the left-hand project simulation panel again, right click on Goals, and select Surface Goals. This will bring up a list of parameters that we wish to measure and visualise, and we can select the minimum, maximum and average for each goal.

First, we want to select the faces of the wing that we want included in the study. In the Surface Goals panel, click the blue Selection area to activate it and click all of the faces of the wing model.

Next, go down the list and check the minimum, maximum and average for the following parameters:

Static Pressure
Total Pressure
Dynamic Pressure
Density (Fluid)
Mach Number
Velocity
Velocity (X)
Turbulence Time
Turbulence Length
Turbulence Intensity
Turbulence Energy
Turbulence Dissipation

Note that we have selected Velocity (X), because this is the direction that the flow will be travelling in.

Click the green check mark to exit Surface Goals.

Next, we want to go into the study panel on the left, right click Input Data and select Calculation Control Options.

Check the iterations box and ensure it is set to 100 iterations. It may be that your simulation requires less, or even more. But for now, 100 iterations is fine. This should be enough for the goals to reach convergence. More iterations will generally give a better result, but after a point, the trade-off between accuracy and time-taken simply isn’t worth it. You can run the simulation all day long and the gains to accuracy will become very modest. So, 100 is fine in this case. Click OK to exit.

Now that our simulation is set up, we can run it. You can find the Run button in the top ribbon (as seen below). Click it and you will see the solver screen appear, informing you of how many iterations are left.

Grab yourself a coffee and wait. Depending on how fast your computer is, this could take a while. My computer is rubbish. It will absolutely take a while.

Displaying the Results

Now the calculations have finished, we can go into the study panel on the left and expand the Results section to show us a selection of graphs and plots. Right clicking any of these plots will allow you to insert the plot into the main window.

Cut Plots

The first plots we will look at are cut plots. This type of plot will display a 2D slice (a plane) of the model, and you can drag the green arrow to move the slice along any part of the 3D model.

Right click Cut Plot, and select Insert.

In this instance, I select Front Plane, then I select Contours to show a contourplot. In the Contours section, you can see that the default parameter should be Velocity (X). We would like to see the pressure contours here, so we can click the parameters box and select Pressure.

Click the green check mark and you will see your plot appear in the main design window. You can move the slice along the length of the wing by using the green drag handle and you can rotate the plot as you would do your 3D model. The image below shows an isometric view and a side view. The color code shows how the colors relate to differences in pressure.

Because the results are already loaded into your computer, you can easily switch between data types by clicking the parameter name just beneath the colour scale and selecting new results to display.

So, if I want to change from a pressure contour plot to a velocity contour plot, I simply click Pressure beneath the colored scale (as seen above) and switch it to velocity. The main plot will change accordingly.Note, if you want to see the slice scan along the entire length of the wing, you can right click on Cut Plot and select Play for a little animation.

Flow Trajectories

Cut plots are nice, but they don’t show the holistic view of what is going on; they simply show a 2D slice of the 3D whole. The trajectory plot is more useful for showing behavior over the full length of the wing at any given time. This is more like a wind tunnel with smoke injected into the chamber, which you may be more familiar with from university.

Right click on the Flow Trajectory option in the study pane, and select Insert. This will open the Flow Trajectories pane.

In this pane, select the faces that we want to be a part of the study as we did for the Cut Plot.

In the Number of Points box, type 15 and set the Spacing to 0.03m.

In the Appearance section, we select Static option, and then we select the appearance of the trajectory. In this instance we select Pipes, but feel free to play around here and experiment with different appearances.

Again, in this plot we will be looking at Pressure, so select that from the Appearance section, and then click the green check icon. The plot will appear in the main window, as you can see below.

Here we can see the variations of pressure as the air flows over the aerofoil, and also we can get some idea of the turbulence/vortices created by the wing tip.

Summary

OK, so you’ve done your first aerofoil flow visualization in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation.

After this tutorial you should now be able to do the following:

• Import aerofoil coordinate geometry
• Create a solid from imported coordinates
• Set up a fluid analysis
• Run the analysis
• Visualize flows in cut plots
• Visualise flows in trajectory plots
• Switch parameters from inside a plot

There are a lot of different visuals that can be created in Flow Simulation (and so little space to write about all the combinations).

The best way to discover them is to experiment with the different parameters and see for yourself!

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

This particular dose of STEAM comes from a Los Angeles-based collective of engineers, roboticists and other assorted “mad scientists” named Two Bit Circus. The group’s goal is to entertain with engineering and create experiences that make people go, “Wow.” And, of course, like any good STEAM project, it hopes to inspire future generations of makers, engineers and artists by showing that artistic creativity is an essential part of STEM.

Fun Experiences

SOLIDWORKS World 2018 saw a keynote speech on the “Art of Engagement” from Brent Bushnell, cofounder of Two Bit Circus. He kicked off his talk by explaining how his company had evolved from a pair of pals creating fun experiences at parties into its current state as a proper company with a commercial and nonprofit wing.

A fun experience at a party, with minimal rules. Because "everyone knows what to do in a room of laser beams." (Image courtesy of Two Bit Circus.)

Early incarnations of the company designed experiences such as a room filled with lasers that participants needed to avoid—Mission Impossible style, a raincloud that rains tequila, and a huge Rube Goldberg machine used in a music video for a band called OK Go.

After a few of these fun earlier projects, the team drew the attention of Chevrolet, which asked the duo to create a spectacle involving a crane, a car and a bunch of shipping containers. After this newfound corporate attention, Bushnell and cofounder Eric Gradman decided that there might be a business opportunity available here, and set about forming the company with the aim of both entertaining and promoting STEM interest. And the best way to do that, they reasoned, was to create their own circus.

“We started a circus with a focus on using engineering to kind a reimagine entertainment,” explained Bushnell. He described one project in which his team used CAD to design a 360-degree camera rig that would be attached to an IndyCar during a race. The camera outputs were sent to a virtual reality (VR) set that would enable a user to experience a race as seen by the driver.

A 360-degree camera rig.(Image courtesy of Two Bit Circus.)

“We did the same for the NFL,” continued Bushnell. “For a bunch of nerds who don’t like sports…we’ve done all the sports stuff.”

Immersive Circus

Bushnell talks about how immersion in media has increased over the years, starting with books and movies (which are passive experiences), and then moving onto interactive games and modern VR. But despite the awesomeness of VR, Bushnell insists that real life is a far better medium for fully interactive, high-resolution, interactive experiences. And so that is what Two Bit Circus focuses on—creating experiences that move the user away from being a traditionally passive consumer of media into a modern, active, creator role.

As an example, the team recently launched STEAM Carnival, a traveling showcase of high-tech entertainment and workshops created to inspire invention. Exhibits at the show included Tesla coils, a flaming dunk tank, lasers and robots (all of which should be mandatory at any event, in my opinion).

Tesla fun. (Image courtesy of Two Bit Circus.)

Cultivating Creativity

To conclude his keynote, Bushnell offered some final observations on how to cultivate creativity (in both kids and adults).

His first tip is to get random inputs. “Get as many different experiences into your life as possible,” suggested Bushnell.

Once you have aggregated your experiences, he suggested you take some time for reflection. “Take time to do nothing,” he continued. “Give it [your mind] the opportunity to find connections between those ideas.”

He then emphasized the importance of taking notes with a pen and paper. “The act of writing it down helps you to remember better….”

Bushnell listed access to tools as an important enabler of the creative process. “You can start with an idea and then bring it to the tool, or you can actually start with a collection of tools and say, ‘Hey, what kind of cool problems can we solve with this?’”  On rapid prototyping and the actual development process, he notes that “the act of iterating and tweaking it is when you get to do a lot of the real learning.”

Finally, Bushnell talked about the significance of mentorship in the creative process.

“If you’re not a mentor, be a mentor. It’s an awesome thing that we need in the world,” he emphasized

Nonprofit

Mentorship and education are clearly a big part of Two Bit Circus’ credos, as evidenced by its Two Bit Circus Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating the next generation of inventors, advancing stewardship of the environment and spurring community engagement. The foundation offers STEAM labs to schools, as well as lab training for both teachers and students. In addition to the lab program, the foundation offers a professional development program. To date, over 1,200 teachers have attended the program’s workshop, which is designed to incorporate the maker movement and the engineering design process into an integrated approach to curriculum development.

The foundation website also contains teaching resources for STEM teachers and students ranging from elementary school to high school.

Future Projects

Two Bit Circus is currently in the process of building a series of micro-amusement parks. The parks are the result of a successful Series B funding injection, and will offer a carnival midway, a VR arena, a robot bartender, and a reimagined video game arcade).

Robotic bartender. (Image courtesy of Two Bit Circus.)

“In the past, Two Bit Circus’ installations have been temporary and held primarily at large events and conferences. We’re thrilled to build our first permanent location in our backyard,” said cofounder Gradman. “Our band of scientists, artists, storytellers and performers are excited to bring to life a world of year-round fun.”

The first park will open later this year in downtown Los Angeles.

If you can’t wait until opening day, you can get a digital taste of what Two Bit Circus is all about by going to its virtual reality gallery armed with your favorite VR headset.

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

SOLIDWORKS 2018 includes the addition of topology optimization, as we touched on in this article.

Today, we are going to take a look at topology optimization in more detail, and I will guide you through the steps in a tutorial. For this tutorial, we are going to use a generic bracket that I have modeled (see Figure 1). I have uploaded the model onto GrabCAD, so you can download it and try it out too.

So sit back, fire up your copy of SOLIDWORKS 2018, and let’s crack on!

Preparation

Load up SOLIDWORKS 2018, and then load up the bracket.

Now, go to the SOLIDWORKS Add-ins tab at the ribbon at the top of the screen and load up the Simulation add-in. Then, locate the Simulation tab on the ribbon, click the New Study icon, and select New Study from the drop-down menu.

Figure 1. The bracket.

This will open up the study pane on the left-hand side of the screen. In the study pane, find the Design Insight section, and click Topology Study. You can rename your study here if you would like. I have left it as the default name (Topology Study 1). Then, click the green check mark. This will open a new study pane in the left-hand pane under the design tree.

Before you begin the study, you need to define a material so that SOLIDWORKS will know how to define the material parameters from its material database.

From the top ribbon, in Simulation tab, select Apply Material. From this list, select Alloy Steel (SS), and then click Apply.

Defining the Simulation Parameters

Now that the model is loaded, the type of study has been defined, and a material has been selected for use in the study, you can begin to define the parameters of the study, such as loads, fixtures and design constraints.

Take a look at the Topology Study 1 panel in the left-hand pane. It should look like what is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Topology Study pane.

Next, you will define the fixtures. These will represent the mounting points where bolts will hold the bracket to a wall. Right-click on Fixtures in the Topology Study pane and select Fixed Geometry from the drop-down menu.

Spin the bracket around to the rear side, and then select the inner faces of the eight bolt holes. Seven holes are selected in the example shown in Figure 3. When you have selected all eight bolt holes, you can click the green check mark in the Fixture panel.

Figure 3. The Fixture panel.

Now, you want to apply a load. The plates that make up the bracket are 10mm thick and made from steel. They are also fairly strong (to put it mildly).

For the purposes of this example, let’s assume that you wish to hang something fairly heavy on this bracket. Maybe it’s part of a vehicle inspection ramp, for instance. The application doesn’t really matter, but let’s assume that you want it to be heavy and distributed across the top face of the bracket. Right-click the External Loads option in the Topology Study pane, select Force from the drop-down menu, and enter 1000 kg of force in the Force Value text entry box. Before you close the Force/Torque pane, you must select a face where you wish to apply this mass. I selected the top face of the bracket (the one with four holes on).

Now, you can close the Force/Torque pane by clicking the green check mark.

Goals and Constraints

This is probably the most important part of topology optimization in SOLIDWORKS 2018 because this is where you tell the software your design targets in terms of optimization.

Right-click the Goals and Constrains option in the Topology Study pane, and from here you will see three types of optimization options:

• Best Stiffness to Weight Ratio (default)
• Minimize Maximum Displacement
• Minimize Mass with Displacement Constraint

Choose the first option, Best Stiffness to Weight Ratio. This will open the Goals and Constraints pane (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Goals and Constraints pane.

Instantly, you can see that the current mass of the non optimized part is 14.05kg. That’s a big old bracket! You could probably build a road bridge with that. I’m thinking that maybe I should have created bigger bolt holes.

Oh well, we won’t worry about it. It’s just an example after all. And, anyway, it will be fun to see how much we can reduce the weight by. That’s what optimization is all about!

Next, go into the Constraint 1 box and type 55 percent into the text box, as shown in Figure 4. This gives a Final Mass of Part equal to 6.3 kg. This value will act as the mass target while the computer runs its iterations.

If you wanted to, you could also activate a second constraint by selecting the Constraint 2 check box. But for now, just use the single constraint, and click the green check mark to exit the Goals and Constraints pane.

Manufacturing Controls

Next down the list in the Topology Study pane is the Manufacturing Controls option.

These add constraints that assist with the manufacturability of the part and can be used to keep regions of material that you don’t want removed by the optimization process.

Right-click on the Manufacturing Controls option, and you can see several options, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Manufacturing Controls.

For this part, you want to choose Add Preserved Region. Clicking this option will open the Preserved Region pane (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Preserved Region pane.

With the Selection box active, you can now go into the main design window and select the faces that you wish to preserve. For this example, select the inner face of each and every hole on the part. This will preserve the regions around the holes. If you look down at the bottom of the Preserved Region pane, you can see an option labeled Preserved Area Depth. By default, this is switched off. But for this example, you want to specify the depth of the face that you will preserve, so activate it with the check box, and select 7mm depth. This will preserve a cylindrical region that extends 7mm from the perimeter of the bolt hole.

As you change the depth, you will see the depth displayed in the main graphic area in relation to the selected face(s). You can see this displayed as purple circles in Figure 7.

You have finished with these preserved regions now, so you can click the green check mark to exit.

Next, go back to the Thickness Control option and select a minimum thickness of 8mm. This just means that no section will be reduced below 8mm.

And, finally, go to the Specify Symmetry Planes option, and select half symmetry along the longitudinal plane. This will ensure that the optimization process is mirrored on both sides. Without it, the process will produce somewhat random results. As the forces are acting downward, and there is no torque to worry about, you can select this option.

And that’s all for the manufacturing controls in this case.

Figure 7. Preserved Region depth preview.

Mesh and Run (and Grab a Coffee)

All of the basic constraints are set, and you are ready to mesh.

Go to the Mesh option at the bottom of the Topology Study pane, right-click it, and select Create Mesh. This will open the Mesh pane (see Figure 8). From here, you can control the Mesh Density. A finer mesh will create a more accurate study, but will take longer to mesh. The opposite is true for a coarse mesh (it will take a shorter time to simulate, but may not be as accurate). So, select Fine mesh, because this is a simple model and it won’t take too long.

Figure 8. Mesh pane.

And that’s all set up. You are ready to run the study and see what happens.

Go to the Simulation tab in the main ribbon at the top of the screen, and click the Run This Study icon. Now, go and make yourself a cup of coffee. This might take a while, depending on your mesh size and the complexity of your model.

4 Coffees Later…

OK—that took longer than expected, but the iterations have converged, and you have something that resembles an optimized part (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. Optimized Mesh in Material Mass view.

If you double-click the Material Mass1 option in the results inside the Topology Study pane, the pane shown in Figure 10 will appear.

Figure 10. Material Mass slider.

You can see that it didn’t quite reduce down to the target mass 6.3 kg at 55 percent. But you can move the slider left and right to remove more mass, and you can use the color key to identify critical sections that need to remain.

You will notice that the model looks a little lumpy at this point. It’s not very aesthetic, and could benefit from some smoothing. Clicking the Calculate Smoothed Mesh icon will bring up a new pane, where you can fix this. For the smoothest mesh, drag the slider to the right, and it will automatically smooth out the model.

Clicking the green check mark will take you out of the Material Mass pane (see Figure 11).

Figure 11.Material Mass pane.

Notice how the bolt holes in Figure 11 have been preserved with the 7mm depth around the inner face of the holes.

Right, that’s all very nice, but what do you do now with your optimized mesh?

Using the Mesh

Well, you have a few options. You can export it as solid or surface part for further refinement, or you can export it as a graphic for use as an overlay to the original part. In addition, you can export it as a surface and use a third-party plug-in to clean up the optimized mesh and make it all nice.

To export the mesh, right-click the Material Mass1 option in the Topology Study pane, and select Export Smoothed Mesh. This will open up the export pane as shown in Figure 12. You can select to export the mesh as a solid, a surface or a graphic. If you will be exporting the mesh as a solid or a surface, you can convert it to an STL file (or some other file format of your choice) later for use in manufacturing.

Figure 12. Export Smoothed Mesh pane.

Alternatively, you can right-click the Material Mass1 option in the Topology Study pane again, and select the Settings option.

From here, you can superimpose the actual original model onto the optimized shape (see Figure 13), and you can use the optimized plot as a template to carve your model manually.

Figure 13. Overlaid mesh onto the model.

The final option is to export the mesh as a surface and use a third-party plug-in such as Power Surfacing by nPower.

Final Thoughts

SOLIDWORKS has been pretty slow in jumping onto the topology optimization boat.

But as this is the first release of the software to feature topology optimization, it’s not a bad effort. You can certainly play around with it and get the basics.

Currently, SOLIDWORKS only supports stiffness-to-weight ratio, and the two deformation optimizations—it doesn’t support strength-to-weight ratio, but this is reportedly in the works.

Also, using the optimized mesh is still a cumbersome process. You have to export the file, or use the overlay and carve the model manually. It would be nice if the software generated a usable and smoothed SLDPRT file automatically. I’m guessing I’m not the only one saying this, so no doubt Dassault Systèmes will listen to users and work on this for a future release.

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

Then why is so much money spent on updating the original drawing when changes are made to the product? Surely, it’s better to just create a good 3D model in the first place that can be reused and updated at will, rather than spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of work hours going back, issuing a change request, waiting for approval, making changes to the drawing, and then waiting for the quality assurance loop to give it the OK. And after all that rigmarole, you still have to update the CAD model so that it fits the new drawing.

In addition to the headaches of updating redundant drawings, many engineering companies still insist on sending 2D drawings with TDG information to manufacturers, where the factory CAD technicians must then convert that 2D information into 3D data so that toolpaths can be generated for manufacturing.

Did you know that as a result of constantly transforming data between 2D drawings and 3D models, 60 percent of 2D drawings don’t match the original intended design? And according to the U.S. Department of Defense(DoD), up to 50 percent of a design team’s time is spent messing around with drawings. That’s insane!

And that is why model-based definition (MBD) is such a great thing. With MBD, it is possible to just jump straight to the 3D modeling phase, add the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) and product manufacturing information (PMI) data to the model, and then go about your day without worrying about the drawing. No more extra sheets of paper with tolerance and surface finish information. No more redline markups on printed PDFs. No more invoices to be paid for drawing updates. And, of course, the environment benefits, too.

As you are about to see in more detail, SOLIDWORKS 2018 MBD enables you do all this and more.

So let’s go ahead and take a look at how we can utilize these features in SOLIDWORKS 2018.

Opening the Tutorial

I initially created a bracket to use as an example for this article, but while searching through the SOLIDWORKS 2018 tutorials within the software, I found a much cooler model to work with for this example. And because the model is located in the SOLIDWORKS MBD tutorial section, it means you can give it a try for yourselves.

To get started, go to the menu at the very top of the screen, select HELP, and click SOLIDWORKS Tutorials in the drop-down menu. This will bring up the tutorials pane, and you can select All SOLIDWORKS Tutorials from the headings. This will show a list of all the tutorials available. I show a shortened version of this list in Figure 1. Take a look at the list and click SOLIDWORKS MBD Overview.

Figure 1. Shortened list of SOLIDWORKS tutorials.

This will open the SOLIDWORKS MBD Overview Tutorial introduction screen in the tutorial panel. Click NEXT TOPIC at the bottom right of the panel. The next screen will provide you with a link to the location of the assembly model that is stored on your hard drive. Click that link, and you will see the drum pedal assembly open in your main design window (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Drum pedal assembly model.

Once the assembly model has loaded, click NEXT TOPIC (Creating a BOM table) at the bottom right of the tutorial pane.

Creating a BOM Table

The bill of materials (BOM) table is a staple of engineering documentation. The need to constantly update the BOM is a real pain in the neck and is also a resource-intensive task for many companies.

Thankfully, updating the BOM tables becomes easier with MBD.

Go to the FeatureManager design tree panel on the left, open the Annotations folder, right-click on Notes Area and click Activate, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Updating a BOM table.

Next, go up to the ribbon at the top of the screen, click the Assembly tab if it isn’t already selected, and click the Bill of Materials icon. This will open the BOM PropertyManager in the FeatureManager design tree area on the left of the screen.

In the PropertyManager, under:

-BOM Type, select Parts only

-Configurations, select Default

-Part Configuration Grouping, select Display as one item number and Display all configurations of the same part as one item

Then click the green check mark icon. You can now position the BOM in the main display area, and resize it as you see fit (just drag the outer borders or columns/rows to resize it), as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Adjusting the BOM.

When you have finished making your adjustments, go to the bottom of the tutorial pane on the right, and click NEXT TOPIC (Adding a Display State).

Adding a Display State

Now we need to add the various display states. Display states show the orientation of the assembly and how the parts are located with respect to each other. These display states can be in the form of orthographic, isometric or any other kind of view that you want to appear in your document. We can rotate parts or make them disappear from view, and once a display state has been assigned to that situation, we can recall it at a later time without needing to manipulate the parts again.

For the first view, we want to orient the annotations so they are in plane with the footboard (the actual pedal).To do this, go into the FeatureManager design tree and expand the annotations folder. Locate the Footboard component, right-click Footboard, and select Activate and Reorient from the menu. This will show the assembly from a top-down view.

Now, we only want to see the actual footboard in this view (not the rest of the assembly), so we need to hide the rest of the assembly. To do this, go to the FeatureManager design tree, locate the PART named foot_board (see Figure 5), right-click the part, and select Isolate. You should see all of the other parts of the assembly disappear.

Figure 5. Hiding the rest of the assembly.

Next up, we want to save this display state. Click the ConfigurationManager tab in the left-hand pane (see Figure 6), then right-click on the empty space in the ConfigurationManager area. In the menu, select Add Display State. You will notice at the bottom of the ConfigurationManager that this new view has been saved as Display State-3.

Figure 6. Adding a Display State.

Now, go back to the bottom of the tutorial pane and click NEXT TOPIC (Capturing the 3D View).

Capturing the 3D View

The next step is to capture the 3D view. Go to the ribbon at the top of the screen, select the SOLIDWORKS MBD tab, and click the Capture 3D View icon, as shown below.

The PropertyManager options will open up in the left-hand pane. Here, you can rename the 3D View Name. In this case, we will keep the name as “Footboard”.

In the Configuration section, select Default.

In Display State, select Display State-3.

In Annotation Views, select Footboard.

And then click the green check mark when you are finished.

Now, go back to the tutorial pane, and click NEXT TOPIC (Copying a Tolerance Scheme) at the bottom.

Copying a Tolerance Scheme

Now we want to copy the tolerance scheme from the full assembly display state (Display State-1) to the isolated footboard display state (Display State-3).

At the bottom of the left-hand pane (ConfigurationManager) under Display States (linked), double-click Display State-1 and the full assembly will appear in the main window. Now,in the ConfigurationManager, double-click Grey. The assembly will turn grey.

Now, go to the ribbon menu at the top, select the SOLIDWORKS MBD tab, and click the Copy Scheme icon. This will open the SchemeProperties panel in the PropertyManager in the left-hand pane. We can change the scheme name here, but in this case, we will leave it as Dimension Schema 1.

In the Source Configuration section, select Default (see Figure 7). Click the green check mark, and then move to the NEXT TOPIC (Adding a Display State) in the tutorial pane.

Figure 7. Copying a Tolerance Scheme.

Adding Display State (again)

Now that the tolerance scheme has been copied, we can add the new display state. This is the same procedure that we used before, except we want to ensure that all of the other annotation views (except for Footboard) are hidden. We can do this by going to the FeatureManager, opening the Annotations folder in the design tree, and right-clicking each component annotation and selecting Hide. Make sure that the Footboard annotation is not hidden. If it is, then right-click on it, and select Show.

Again, go down the FeatureManager design tree to the actual part icons, right-click on Foot_Board part, and press Isolate. All of the other components will again disappear. As before, now we click on the ConfigurationManager tab in the left-hand pane, right-click in an empty space, and click Add Display State. This will create Display State-4.

Now that we have added the display state to the grey component, we can move to the next step. Click Next Topic (Capturing the 3D View) in the tutorial pane.

Capturing the 3D View

Return to the ribbon at the top of the screen, select the SOLIDWORKS MBD tab, and click the Capture 3D View icon as before.

In the PropertyManager area, we will rename the 3D View Name as “Grey Footboard”.

In the Configuration section, select Grey.

In Display State, select Display State-4.

In Annotation Views, select Footboard.

Then click the green check mark and go to the NEXT TOPIC.

Adding Balloons to the Assembly

In the ConfigurationManager, double-click Default and select Display State-1 at the bottom of the pane. This will recall the full assembly.

In the FeatureManager design tree, expand the Annotations folder, right-click Front and click Activate and Reorient. The view in the main area will change to the front plane, and you will see the full drum pedal assembly from the side, complete with the DimXpert annotations. We don’t want these, because we are creating a new 3D view with bubbles.

To hide the DimXpert annotations, right-click Annotations and clear Show DimXpert Annotations.

Now, go to the SOLIDWORKS MBD toolbar at the top of the screen and click the Balloon icon.

In the PropertyManager, under Settings, in Balloon text source, select Bill of Materials1. This will link the balloon text to our BOM.

Now, if you click on a part in the main view, the balloon tool will know which part you are trying to identify and will create a balloon connected to that part via a leader line. Click to place balloons as shown in Figure 8. The balloons will automatically be numbered based on the BOM you created.

Figure 8. Creating a BOM with bubbles.

Click the green check mark and move on to the NEXT TOPIC.

Capture Again

Now we need to Capture the 3D View again.

Click Capture 3D View (in the SOLIDWORKS MBD toolbar).

In the PropertyManager:

In 3D View Name, type Balloons.

In Configuration, select Grey.

In Display State, select Display State-2.

In Annotation Views, select Front1.

Click the green check mark to finish, and click NEXT TOPIC.

Exploded View

Now that we have aligned our orthographic views with the corresponding planes for the annotations, we can do an exploded view.

In the FeatureManager design tree, expand Annotations folder, right-click Isometric and click Activate and Reorient. On the SOLIDWORKS MBD ribbon at the top, click Exploded View.

Now we can click on various parts in the design window and explode them as we see fit. Alternatively, we can expand the Hardware folder in the FeatureManager design tree and select the components from there. This is particularly useful for selecting hard-to-see items, such as screws. In this exploded view, I have exploded the base, two of the screws and the beater shaft (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. An exploded view of the model.

Now that the model has been exploded, we can go to the NEXT TOPIC and capture the 3D view again.

Click Capture 3D View in SOLIDWORKS MBD ribbon.

In the PropertyManager, in 3D View Name, type “Exploded View”.

In Configuration, select ExplView1.

In Display State, select Display State-2.

In Annotation Views, select Isometric.

Publishing the Document

We are done! We can finally publish the model as a document. Click NEXT TOPIC to continue.

If you take a look in the SOLIDWORKS MBD ribbon, you will see several options related to document publishing (see Figure 10). Here, we can click on the Publish to 3D PDF icon. If you wish to change the template to 3D PDFs, you can do so by clicking the Template Editor icon. We can also publish to eDrawing format, but for this tutorial, let’s look at 3D PDF publishing.

Figure 10. Publishing options.

Now we can view our published 3D PDF document, with the BOM list, the various views (see Figure 11) and any other PMI data that we chose to include in it (see Figure 12).

Figure 11. The BOM list with different views.

Figure 12. PMI data included with the BOM. 

Summary

Using SOLIDWORKS MBD removes the need for going back and changing drawings, because the main source of our data is in the form of a 3D model. This model can contain data for manufacturing, such as for CNC toolpaths, or even 3D printing. That same model can be used for creating a BOM, or for rendering to create marketing materials. In MBD, the 3D asset is central to everything.

In principle, one could create the model in 3D from scratch, assign the dimensions and PMI data, and produce an electronic drawing—then have that item manufactured without ever having to touch a piece of paper. Moreover, if we wish to update the final drawing information, we need only go back and alter the model.

As you have seen, the procedure for creating the document is fairly repetitive. It involves selecting the best angle for presentation, saving the display state, ensuring the annotations are available to that specific view, and then repeating the process until we have the views we require.

The good news is that we can make use of templates when it comes to creating the final document. So, while the process may seem a little tedious at first, I can promise you from experience that it’s a lot less time consuming than going from 2D to 3D and back again to 2D.

Give it a try for yourself.

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

Users of SOLIDWORKS 2018 may have noticed the new Welcome screen (it’s hard to miss). And on this screen, you may have noticed some online features that you may not have noticed before. While some of these features have existed previously in various forms, Dassault Systèmes is making an effort to draw your attention to these features from the minute you open the software.

This is no accident: SOLIDWORKS is more connected for this latest release, and obviously Dassault wants you to be aware of it. In this article, we are going to take a look at this enhanced connectivity and how you can benefit from it.

You’re Welcome

First up, the aforementioned Welcome screen (pictured below). When you first start the software, you will be greeted with a Welcome box overlaying the main design window. On the Welcome screen, there are four tabs: Home, Recent, Learn and Alerts.

At the bottom right-hand side of the Welcome box, we can see the Resources section, which is our first glimpse of the connected features. Many of these links will be familiar to users of previous versions, and to access any of them, you will need the bare minimum of a SOLIDWORKSID (which you can create for free), and for many of the services, you will require a full active subscription.

The first tab on the Welcome screen consolidates links to various online services.

The first icon, named “What’s New,” is self-explanatory, and clicking on it will take you to a portal and will show you the recent upgrades to this release.

Next up, we have the MySolidWorks icon. This will take you to the MySolidWorks website, where those with an account will be able to access resources such as training, CAD models in 3D Content Central, forums, a cloud storage drive and access to the Manufacturing Network.

Next up in the Resources section of the Welcome screen is the SOLIDWORKS Forums link. This can be accessed via this link and also directly from the MySolidWorks website. You need a basic profile to view the forums and a full subscription to participate in forum discussions.

The Customer Portal icon takes you to the aptly-named customer portal, where you can also access the forums, customer support and downloads area where active subscribers can download extra programs such as SOLIDWORKS Composer and the newly released SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Clicking the User Groups icon will transport you to the user groups website, which is kind of like a networking hub for SOLIDWORKS users all over the world, and contains details of national meet ups and events as well as help and support from within the community.

And finally, we have the Get Support icon, which unsurprisingly takes you to the customer help section.

Moving to the next tabs in the Welcome screen, we next see the Recent tab. This is not an online feature, so we won’t dwell on that in this article (but in short, it just highlights your most recently opened SOLIDWORKS documents).

More relevant to our online interests is the next tab, Learn.

The Learn tab contains access to introductory lessons to help newbies get started as well as more detailed tutorials and the MySolidWorks Training section.

This last section allows 24/7 access to training resources and tests, all designed to improve your SOLIDWORKS skill level. At the bottom of this tab, we can see there are options for keeping progress on your training, and also for access to the certification process, for those wishing to become certified professionals. There is a big friendly icon linking you to 3DContentCentral as well, just in case you forgot how to access this within the last three minutes. Just like how all the proverbial roads lead to Rome, it seems that all of the links in the Welcome screen lead back to the same places.

The Learn tab links you to 3D ContentCentral and also allows you to keep track of your training.

Finally, in the Welcome screen, we see the Alerts tab. The Alerts tab keeps you up to date with the most recent announcements pertaining to updates for your software (updates such as new service packs).

Live technical alerts are front and center to keep your software current.

As you can see, the Welcome screen is hardly reinventing the wheel, rather it is a consolidation of online resources that Dassault Systèmes thinks you may find useful.

And of course, you can disable the Welcome screen if you wish by checking the box at the bottom of the Welcome page.

Even More Connected

OK, so that’s the Welcome screen. But surely there is more to the enhanced connectivity than just consolidating a bunch of links together? Yes!

Synchronizing Settings and Options Across Multiple Machines

If you use the SOLIDWORKS software with multiple machines, you can now update your settings on any of the machines and synchronize those settings across all machines that run SOLIDWORKS 2018. To use a simple analogy, it’s like importing your Google account settings from your home PC to your work PC and having all of your Chrome settings follow you (pretty handy).

To synchronize settings and options across multiple machines, you should follow these steps:

1. In Tools > Options, click Synchronize Settings.
2. Choose between a manual or an automatic method:

• Synchronize Now (manual)—Upload settings to send your settings from the current machine to the cloud storage service. Update your settings in the cloud at any time by uploading them again later. Download settings to download and apply your settings from the cloud storage service to the current machine.
• Automatic Synchronization (auto)—Select this option to synchronize the current machine(s)automatically with the cloud storage service. Your selected settings and customizations automatically upload to the cloud storage services as they are updated and will download and be applied on startup or login.

3. Click OK.

And of course, all of this synchronisation is made possible thanks to online licensing. Online licencing makes using your license on multiple machines much easier than before by using your SOLIDWORKS login details (similar to your Google or Apple account). One login to rule them all.

Online Trial

Before the 2017 release of SOLIDWORKS, getting your hands on a SOLIDWORKS trial was a bit of a hassle. First, it was only available to commercial users (and not students), and to obtain it, you would have to fill in an online form and await someone to contact you and provide you with a download link.

Online trials are back for the 2018 release, and once again, users of all levels (student or pro) can simply sign up and gain access to an online trial version. No more forms, no more waiting and no installation.

Because the trial requires no installation and works in your browser, you cannot open or save data to your own computer. If you want to experiment with your own data, you can read and write data using Dropbox, Box or Google Drive. Note that any files you create will be deleted from the evaluation system after you close the evaluation session.

On the trial website, it states that once you have purchased the software, you will need to install the full version on your computer. At time of writing, SOLIDWORKS tools are not offered through the browser platform—it is limited to free evaluations and trials only.

But is this the shape of things to come? In the future, will we be able to access SOLIDWORKS via a browser, on any machine, and have all of your files accessible through the cloud? This is the second release of SOLIDWORKS that has had a browser-accessible trial … is there a full cloud-based version on the horizon? I guess we will have to wait and see. The company has been promising a frame-based online version since 2016…a fully functional browser-based version has yet to materialize.

So if you are interested in an online trial, just click on this link and sign up—you can see some of the new improvements for yourself. Personally, I’m looking forward to trying the topology optimization features! No doubt we will cover that in greater detail in another article. Ciao for now!

The most significant addition to this latest release of SOLIDWORKS revolves around the new touch, gesture and pen-based inputs.

Just to clarify, these features are only available to users of Windows 10 who have downloaded the Windows 10 Creators Update. You can download that update at this link.

You can use pen and touch input with compatible, touch-enabled devices to create freehand sketch strokes and convert them into sketch geometry with the tools in the software’s Sketch Ink CommandManager. You can access this function by right-clicking the CommandManager tab and clicking Sketch Ink or View > Toolbars > Sketch Ink.

Clicking the touch icon tool in the Sketch Ink CommandManager will allow you to use a finger to sketch entities in the graphics area. Similarly, if you want to use a pen/stylus on a touchscreen or drawing board, you can click the pen icon, which is also found in the Sketch Ink CommandManager.

As well as being able to draw freehand, you can use these new input methods to draw lines, arcs, polygons, circles and ellipses.

Take a look at the short video below to see a demonstration of how touch sketching works in SOLIDWORKS 2018.

Man in the Mirror

The next new additions we will take a look at are enhancements to the mirror entities sketch functions.

In previous releases of SOLIDWORKS, mirroring entities was only possible around linear entities such as lines or edges. If you recall, if you wanted to create a symmetrical sketch when using an earlier release of the software, you would literally have to sketch a line and use that as your mirror reference line. Then, the selected entities that you wanted mirrored would appear on the opposite side of that line.

Now, you can mirror your entities about a plane or a planar model face too.

Figure 1. Now you can mirror 3D sketches about a plane. (Image courtesy of Hawk Ridge Systems.)

You can do this by clicking the mirror entities icon in the sketch toolbar, or, alternatively, you can click the following menus:

Tools > Sketch Tools > Mirror > Mirror About

And then you can select a reference plane or a planar face in the graphics area.

Of course, this means that you are now able to mirror 3D sketches as well, rather than just 2D sketches.

Take a look at the video below for more information.

I'll Take Your Brain to Another Dimension…

Pay close attention! The next enhancement to SOLIDWORKS 2018 sketch feature is the addition of Smart Dimension to the Context Toolbar.

In previous releases of SOLIDWORKS, you could only preselect entities and then use the Smart Dimension tool to dimension entities (in fact, the tool on the context menu no longer supports preselection at all). That has changed for this release, and users can now dimension certain entities from the Auto Insert Dimension tool on the Context Toolbar.

The entities supported by the dimensioning tools on the context menu are:

• Line: Linear dimension
• Arc: Radial dimension
• Circle: Diameter dimension
• Two lines at an angle: Angular dimension between entities
• Two parallel lines: Linear dimension between entities
• Arc or circle, and line: Linear dimension between line and centerpoint
• Point and line: Linear dimension between line and point
• Arc or circle, and point: Linear dimension between point and centerpoint
• Arc/Arc or Circle/Circle or a combination thereof: Linear dimension between center points

Smart Dimension, it seems, just got smarter.

Much Undo About Nothing

In previous releases, when working with large sketches, the Automatic Solve Mode and Undo would repeatedly turn off in large sketches. In SOLIDWORKS 2018, this has changed, and now you can enable and disable Automatic Solve Mode and Undo, and modify the threshold limit for sketch entities.

To control Automatic Solve and Undo in Parts and Assemblies, follow these steps:

Click Tools > Options > System Options > Sketch

• To disable the behavior of automatic turn off of Automatic Solve Mode and Undo, clear Turn off Automatic Solve Mode and Undo when a sketch contains more than this number of sketch entities.
• To modify the threshold limit, select Turn off Automatic Solve Mode and Undo when a sketch contains more than this number of sketch entities and enter the input value in the input box.

Then click OK.

And to control Automatic Solve, Undo, and No Solve Move in Drawings:

Click Tools > Options > System Options > Drawings > Performance

• To disable the behavior of automatic turn off of Automatic Solve Mode and Undo, clear Turn off Automatic Solve Mode and Undo and turn on No Solve Move when a drawing view contains more than this number of sketch entities.
• To modify the threshold limit, select Turn off Automatic Solve Mode and Undo and turn on No Solve Move when a drawing view contains more than this number of sketch entities and enter the input value in the input box.

Then click OK.

Dangerous Curves

SOLIDWORKS 2018 allows users to flip the tangency direction for specific curved sketch entities, such as splines and arcs.

This is very easy to do and can be used for repairing failed tangencies in your sketch.

In the Design Tree, right-click the sketch containing the arc with the tangent failure and click Edit Sketch to open up the sketch in the main window.

In the graphics area, right-click the arc or spline in question, and click Reverse Endpoint Tangent on the shortcut menu. You will notice that the tangency is now reversed and the arc has been flipped.

Click Edit > Rebuild

And you’re done.

Circular Sketch Patterns

And last, but by no means least, in SOLIDWORKS 2018 circular sketch patterns are no longer limited to the number of instances allowed. And the keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I have now run out of puns for the subheadings!

That seems like a good time to bow out, gracefully or otherwise.

Keep an eye out on the main Engineers Rule front page for upcoming news and tutorials for the latest release, SOLIDWORKS 2018!

About the Author

Phillip Keane is currently studying his PhD at the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His background is in aerospace engineering, and his current studies are focused on the use of 3D-printed components in spaceflight. He previously worked at Rolls-Royce and Airbus Military and served as an intern for Made In Space and the European Southern Observatory.

After achieving success over in Europe, Dassault Systèmes decided to bring the Lab across the Atlantic and opened a new 3DEXPERIENCE Lab in May 2017, located at the North American HQ of Dassault Systèmes in Waltham, MA.

Engineering.com spoke with Abhishek Bali, the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab North America Manager, to get the skinny on what’s going down at the new Lab.

Figure 1 Fabbers...fabbing in the Lab. (Image credit: 3DEXPERIENCE Lab.)

“3DEXPERIENCE Lab Boston combines the strengths of a Startup Accelerator and a sophisticated Fab Lab set up in collaboration with MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, to facilitate the creative community of entrepreneurs and makers in the US with latest hardware and software tools” said Bali. “The Lab’s Grand Opening on May 30^th, 2017 met resounding success with over 150 delegates from across industries, domains and geographies participating in the event, flanked by live demos of cutting-edge hardware, software and VR technologies.”

And the list of hardware is indeed impressive. The Lab features state-of-the-art Digital Fabrication tools, including high-end CO2 and Fiber Laser Cutters, Precision Mills, CNC Routers, a Vinyl Cutter, a Robotic Arm, a well-equipped Electronics Station and a variety of 3D Printers and Scanners. But of all the tools and equipment available to the users of the Lab (also known as “fabbers”), Bali gives kudos to one tool in particular

“The most advanced ‘piece of equipment’ in the Lab is the human mind” mused Bali. “It is amazing to see our fabbers and mentors coming to the Lab and experimenting with new creative ideas born out of their ingenuity. This is exactly what makes 3DEXPERIENCE Lab live and kicking!”

The 3DEXPERIENCE Lab operates on a unique Mentor-Fabber Interaction model. Every new fabber, is assigned to a set of mentors who train her/ him across various machines in the Lab. These mentors are Dassault Systèmes employees who have spent more than 20 hours in training across at least 5 machines in the Lab. The initial set of mentors were trained by instructors from MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms(CBA) in a rigorous week long ‘Train the Mentor’ program. The program was led by none other than Prof. Neil Gershenfeld, Director of CBA, and the visionary behind Fab Foundation, the organization that connects over 1000 Fab Labs from across the world.

In addition to mentors, Fab Lab has a cohort of interns and co-ops from some of the best technical university programs that include MIT, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Northeastern University, and so on. Student startup teams from Babson College with hardware-based entrepreneurial ventures are using the Lab for fast prototyping and making proofs-of-concept for their innovative business ideas.

In the Lab, SOLIDWORKS and CATIA are used for 3D modelling, SIMULIA is used for multibody, multi-physics and computational fluid dynamics simulation, ENOVIA for project management, along with EXALEAD and NETVIBES for data management and research. DraftSight is used in the Lab for 2D Modeling. All of these are Dassault Systèmes owned software brands that facilitate Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

“In this sense, they utilize the full-spectrum strength of various tools of Dassault Systèmes’s 3DEXPERIENCE Platform that offers amazing apps for 3D Modelling & Simulation, Social Collaboration, and utilizing information intelligence throughout the complete lifecycle of a product from ideation to production” says Bali. “Dassault Systèmes, as you know, takes pride in being a 3DEXPERIENCE Company, with its wide range of software solutions that cover all aspects of Product Lifecycle Management across industries and product categories.”

Speaking of projects, the Lab is currently hosting students and mentors working on a variety of projects including assisted technology based virtual hands, Da-Vinci inspired mechanisms and Arduino-based connected devices.

“One of my personal favorites is called Ultrasonic Flash Light Sensor” said Bali. “The idea is to help one of our dear colleagues who is visually challenged to walk using a context-aware system that can reliably inform him about obstacles in his path. A diverse team of mentors is working on this project, bringing together their strengths in Electronics, User Experience, Industrial Design and Product Engineering.”

Figure 2 Wing-box under construction (Image credit: 3DEXPERIENCE Lab.)

The more keen-eyed among you may have noticed an image of a metal aircraft wing box being assembled in the pictures. This is part of another cool project (cool to me, because I’m an aerospace engineer) which is being undertaken in the Lab.

“We are really excited about the assembly of the Zenith CH 750 Cruzer in our premises” says Bali. “Zenith Aircraft Company is a SOLIDWORKS customer and has used the software to design the plane assembly from scratch. The 3DEXPERIENCE Lab is running a cross-collaborative exercise around assembling the entire plane by involving over 300 Dassault Systèmes employees, partners, Customers and user groups in the coming months. We have ‘build sessions’ thrice a week in which we invite a cohort of 10 participants who have never held a rivet gun or touched a toolset in their life, in the lab to co-work and assemble one small part of the plane at a time. They of course go through safety instructions training and are supervised thoroughly at every step of the 1-hour long training exercise by Terence McCabe, our Engineer-in Chief for the project.”

And let’s not forget the accelerator part of the program. The 3DEXPERIENCE Lab is not only focused on providing the tools for students to create awesome new products, but what is innovation without a market application? It is the very definition of innovation- to create new applications which have value in the marketplace. So, for budding entrepreneurs with an innovative streak, 3DEXPERIENCE Lab has it covered as well.

“The Accelerator program extends the footprint of the highly successful program in 3DEXPERIENCE Lab Paris to the across the Atlantic in the United States” says Bali. “The program is highly selective, with over 300 startups having applied to it over the past two years and only a handful getting selected for incubation. The idea is to have 4 to 6 US-based startups that can truly shift the scales of innovation around the 6 themes of Life, City, Lifestyle, Internet of Things, Ideation, and Fab Lab. The startups will be selected through a rigorous Open Innovation-based process with Dassault Systèmes’s in-house domain experts along with the CEO, Bernard Charlès. They will evaluate each startup for couple of months leading up to a quarterly Innovation Committee Event in company’s Global Headquarters at Velizy in France. The next event will be held in September 2017 and we can expect the first lot of startups in the Boston Lab around that time. These startups will get full access to 3DEXPERIENCE Platform’s tools, state-of-the-art Fab Lab, physical co-working space and technical mentorship for two years without having to give away equity or IP rights”. Dassault Systèmes are not content to rest on their laurels either, and have their eyes firmly focused on the horizon.

“While we have a plan in place to make the Lab a center for Digital Fabrication excellence (3D Printing, Laser Cutting, CNC Milling and Routing), we also want to build expertise in domains of Electronics and Robotics” says Bali. “The idea is to foster ways of cross-pollinating expertise across domains to power low-investment to high-impact projects along upcoming domains such as Internet of Things, Social Robotics and so on. When we talk about expanding radially, we want to continue involving more and more partners, stakeholders and users in the process of ‘digital maker-ship’. The 3DEXPERIENCE Lab is already connected to a global network of over 1000 Fab Labs through Fab Foundation. We aim to become a super node in this network in coming years and host classes and interactions of Fab Academy Coursework which is a rigorous 6-month coursework taught by Neil Gershenfeld (Professor at MIT and the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms) himself”.

Figure 3 Building an aircraft in the Lab (Image Credit: 3DEXPERIENCE Lab.)

So there you have it. The 3DEXPERIENCE Company is investing heavily in cultivating minds and facilitating training and incubation to students and startups, as well as providing an enviable experience for students wishing to taste the full product design journey for themselves.

If you’re part of a startup(or just plain curious) and are interested in the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, feel free to reach out for more information and for applying to the Accelerator program. The link is: www.3dexperiencelab.com

To learn more about Dassault Systèmes, please visit: www.3ds.com

The snap hook system consists of two parts. The first part (the male part) is generally a cantilever beam with a hook on the end, and the second part (female) is the receptacle, or groove, into which the cantilever and hook will fit. The cantilever undergoes some displacement as it traverses the receptacle, and once it is mated, the cantilever relaxes to provide a tight fastening. If you want to know more about the mechanics, mathematics and guidelines for designing such a system, there is an excellent guide from Bayer MaterialScience that can be found here.

Figure 1. A snap fit profile and cross-section. (Image courtesy of Bayer MaterialScience.)

Let’s assume that you understand the mechanics of how snap-fit fasteners work (maximum permissible deflection, mating force, stress and strain, etc.) and that you wish to design a system in SOLIDWORKS.

Getting Started

As with last month’s tutorial on the lip/groove feature, we will start off with two halves of a box. I have created one box, and to save time, I will just mirror that body above the top plane so that we now have a hollow enclosure. When our snap-fit fasteners and groove are complete, we will have designed a snap-fit system for mating these components together.

Figure 2. The bottom half of the enclosure.

Figure 3.The full enclosure.

For now, we can hide the top half of the enclosure as it will just get in the way. In the design tree, right-click the body that represents the top half of the box, and click the Hide icon. It will then disappear from the viewing area.

The first step is to define some sort of reference point where we will locate the snap hook once we have evoked the snap hook feature. To do this, I select the right plane (or front plane—it’s a square box, so it doesn’t matter. We just want to define the midpoint of the inner edge).

Once the plane is selected, I click the 3D Sketch option from the ribbon at the top of the screen, and I sketch a point on the midpoint of the inner top edge. I constrain the point so that it lies on the point, and at the midpoint of the edge.

Figure 4. Defining reference points with a 3D sketch.

Now that the reference point is defined, we can go ahead and begin with the snap hook creation feature.

Snap Hook Feature

The next step is to invoke the fastening feature wizard.

We can do this by going to the top menus, selecting INSERT > FASTENING FEATURE > SNAP HOOK.

This will open a section in the left-hand pane that is divided into two parts. At the top portion, we can see a section titled Snap Hook Selections (see Figure 5), and it is in this section where we will locate our hook on the model body. Beneath that section is a 2D representation of the hook geometry titled Snap Hook Data. First, we will position the hook on the model using the Snap Hook Selections options.

The first box allows us to select a position for the location of the hook body (the cantilever part). Click the box, then go into the main graphic area and select which face you will be using and where exactly on that face you want the hook body to appear. I select the reference point that we created in the previous step. This is lying on the top most face. The middle of the hook’s width is snapped onto the reference point, so the hook will lie right in the middle of the box width.

The next box in the selections pane allows us to define the vertical direction of the hook. I have selected the top plane, so the vertical direction will point upward. Please feel free to mess around with these settings to get a feel for them.

The third box allows us to define the direction of the hook itself (the horizontal direction, if you will). I want my hook to face away (outward) from the center of the box so as to create a flush exterior finish, so I select the exterior face that is adjacent to the hook (face <1>).

You can see a summary of these actions in Figure 5, and I have labeled the face and points for easy reference.

Figure 5. Snap Hook Selections.

Snap Hook Data

Now that the hook is located on the box, we can begin to change the hook dimensions according to our design requirements.

If you go back to the Snap Hook section in the left hand pane and scroll down below Snap Hook Selections, you will see a 2D illustration of the hook profile and a view of the hook from the front (the wide part).

Figure 6. Snap hook data.

Here we can input dimensions for the depth at the top of the hook, the length of the main hook body (I have made it 20mm), the width at the root (3.43mm) and so on.

Those of you who are familiar with hook design may notice a glaring omission in the input boxes. There is no option here to select the angle of inclination. This is very important in snap hook design as it affects the mating friction and also the mating force. If you want to figure out your angle of incidence, you will have to use some trigonometry here. Just imagine the hook as a right triangle and you can vary the sides accordingly to give you the required angle.

Now that the hook is positioned and the dimensions are as required, we can move onto the next step. Click the green tick icon and close the snap hook pane.

Snap Hook Groove

Now that the hook is complete, we can begin to construct the groove into which the hook will reside when the two halves of the box are mated together. First, we need to unhide the top half of the box that was hidden earlier in this process. Right-click on the top half of the box in the design tree and click the show icon. The top half of the box will appear in the main graphics window.

Invoke the Snap Hook Groove feature by going to the top menu and selecting INSERT > FASTENING FEATURE > SNAP HOOK GROOVE. This will open the Snap Hook Groove selection pane on the left-hand side of the screen. This section is a lot easier than the Snap Hook portion, because we are just going to select the existing hook and the software will basically do the rest.

Figure 7. Snap Hook Groove pane.

Click the first box in the Feature and Body Selections section. This will allow us to select the hook. We can do this from the design tree, where it is labeled in this instance as Snap Hook 1.

The next input box below that allows us to select the body into which we will make the actual groove. Naturally, we select the top half of the box.

And that is pretty much it. If you rotate your model, you can see there is now a groove on the inside face. For all intents and purposes, you now have a snap hook and groove system.

You will note, however, that there is another 2D drawing of the hook in the Snap Hook Groove pane, along with a few more input boxes. These boxes allow you to design in some offset, which allows the hook greater clearance. By default, mine has a 2mm offset to the gap height. This will allow my hook to engage a little bit sooner than required (and in reality, this will allow a loose fitting of the top half to the bottom half of the box—it will wiggle around a bit). For a good measure, I just add 0.25mm to the width clearance. I’m actually going to 3D print my box and my fasteners, so I want a little bit of extra clearance, just in case.

While you are playing around with these values, you will see the groove change in real time in the graphics window, and you will see a wireframe ghost image of the snap hook itself, so you can get a visual idea of what is going on.

Figure 8. Wireframe of hook plus groove.

When you are happy with the groove design, just press the green tick and the Snap Hook Groove pane will close. Congratulations—you have created a Snap Hook and Groove system.

But wait…a single snap hook by itself is not very useful in this context, right? Correct. When fastening two halves together, you are going to need more than one fastener. Otherwise, it’s not so much a fastener, but more of a hinge. And not a very good hinge at that.

Replicating the hook and groove is very easy. It’s just like copying any other feature.

I click the Features tab in the top ribbon menu, and click Mirror. In the Mirror pane, I select the front plane as my mirror plane and simply select the hook and the groove from the design tree (or the graphics window), and Bob’s your uncle. We now have two hooks, two grooves and a sturdy fastening. We can mirror this feature as many times as we like and along any plane.

Figure 9. Mirroring the hook and groove feature.

So, there you have it. You are now well on your way to creating plastic enclosures. Of course, many enclosures don't rely exclusively on snap hooks—they also combine the snap hook system with lips and grooves. Luckily, there is a tutorial on that as well, so why not have a look at last month’s tutorial on the lip/ groove feature, combine it with snap hooks and give it a go.

Figure 1.A lip, groove and sandwich in a lunch box. (Image courtesy of Global Baby.)

Of course, it’s not just lunch boxes that feature lip and groove mating. Your smartphone likely has one, too, as does your laptop power supply enclosure. In fact, wherever two plastic shells need to be mated to create a flush enclosure, there is a good chance that there is a lip and groove aligning and mating the two components together.

In this tutorial, we are going to take a look at the lip and groove feature in SOLIDWORKS, which provides an easy method for creating lip and groove parts in your designs. It’s a fairly easy tool to use, and once you have mastered it, you can greatly reduce the time needed to incorporate these features into your designs. 

Make a Box

Okay, so the first step is to make a box or container of some kind. The box will need to have two components—a base and a lid. I won’t go into describing how to make a box in this tutorial. Let’s just say that knowing how to make a model of a hollow container is a prerequisite for using the lip and groove feature!

The important thing to note is that the lip and groove feature only works in part mode. It will not work in assembly mode. So, you can either build your box as two separate bodies in part mode, or else you can build the base first and import the lid as a separate body into the same part document.

In Figure 1, I have opted to design both the lid and base in the same document.

In the figure, you will notice that I have added some internal ribs to the base of the box. This is not an accident, and you will see why I have done this later.

Figure 2. Generic box and lid with internal ribs.

Now that you have your container model opened in part mode, you will need to access the lip and groove feature.

The feature can be accessed from the menus at the top of the display:

Insert> Fastening Features> Lip/Groove

This sequence will open the feature selection window up on the left-hand pane.

Figure 3. Accessing the lip and groove feature.

Figure 4. The Lip/Groove pane.

From here, you will see a number of options. In the first section, you will see two input selection boxes for Body/Part Selection. This is where you will select which body you want the lip to appear on, and which body you wish to apply the groove to. I have selected the part named “Base” to apply the groove to, but your design may differ. The third selection box in this section allows you to select the groove’s cut direction. Generally speaking, you will want the cut to be in a downward-facing direction, so pick a downward-facing edge as a reference point. In my example, I have selected one of the longest edges of the internal ribs. Note that If all the selected faces on which to create the lip and groove are planar and have the same normal face, the default direction will be normal to the planar faces.

After defining your parts to apply the lip and groove, and after defining the direction, you can scroll down the Lip/Groove pane to the next section, which is called “Groove Selection.”

The first box allows you to select the faces on which you wish to cut your groove. In my example, I have selected the topmost face of the base. Beneath that is the box that will allow you to define the inner or outer edge where you will cut the groove. I have selected the inside edges of the topmost face, which I defined in the previous box.  Below these two boxes,you will see two check boxes.

Figure 6. Examples of jump gaps cleared and jump gaps selected.

One check box is for “Tangent Propagation,” which allows you to extend the groove cut to tangent edges (I left this unchecked because my edges are planar),while the next check box allows you to “jump gaps.” I have checked this box. Remember the vertical ribs on the inside of the box? By checking the Jump Gaps box, SOLIDWORKS will cut a groove behind the ribs and create a receptacle for the lip to slot behind them.

Figure 6. Defining the groove.

After inputting the definitions for the groove, scroll down a little more on the Lip/Groove pane and you will seethe “Lip Selection” area. The options here are exactly the same as the groove section because—wait for it—a lip is basically a geometrically mirrored groove.

When you click the Lip Selection box, the body with the groove will disappear from the main window and the lid section will become visible. You will repeat the same procedure you used for the body with the groove except for one difference: if your groove is on the inner edge, then you will need to cut your lip into the outer edge of this part. And, conversely, if the groove is on the outer edge, then you will need to apply your lip to the inner edge of this body in order for the full assembly to mate together.

So now your lip and groove geometry is defined, you have specified which edges are to be cut away on each body, and you are free to move on to the next section.

Figure 7. Lip and groove parameters.

Scroll down to the last section in the left-hand Lip/Groove pane and you will be greeted with a cross-sectional drawing of a lip and groove, with input boxes pointing to each part of the lip and groove. This is where you will define the custom dimensions for your lip and groove. Although it should be noted, that as long as there are no conflicts in your geometry, you should have the default values applied already and you can actually click on the “Show Preview” check box to see what your design will look like. If you are happy with the default settings, then you can click the green check mark at the top of the Lip/Groove pane, and you will see the lip and groove applied to your model in the main window.

If you are not happy with the default settings, then you can change the values in the white boxes manually. For example, maybe your lip isn’t tall enough. In that instance, you will want to look at the drawing, locate the input box corresponding to lip height, and change the value. SOLIDWORKS will then create a deeper cut and create a taller lip. Altering these values will alter the tolerances and hence the fit of the mate where it comes to manufacture.

Finally, there are three check boxes at the bottom of the pane: Link matched values, Show preview and Maintain existing wall faces.

The Link matched values option will equate certain parameters to each other, ensuring that when scaled they remain relative to each other.

Checking the Maintain existing wall faces option will maintain the draft version when possible and extend the existing wall face to the top of the lip,if you create a lip on a model wall that has a draft version.

So, there you have it. The lip and groove feature is pretty easy to use and saves a lot of time when you are designing enclosures. I have used it a few times, and it’s especially good for 3D-printed enclosures. Just remember to make the thickness of your lip at least three filaments wide for a more sturdy and rigid lip.

Figure 8. Close-up of groove (left) and lip (right).

Budget space company Copenhagen Suborbitals belongs to this latter category of space explorers and is making the most of CAD tools in order to reduce development costs, all with the lofty aim of launching a person into a suborbital trajectory onboard a DIY spaceship.

It’s the modern-day equivalent of the Mercury Redstone project, which you may recall as the project that put the first American (Alan Sheppard) into space. But naturally, Copenhagen Suborbitals lacks the budget of NASA.

Founded in Copenhagen in May 2008, Copenhagen Suborbitals claims to be the “world’s only amateur space program.” The focus of that expression is of course on the word “amateur”…because the 50+ staff at Copenhagen Suborbitals are all working as volunteers, many of whom have actual full-time day jobs as well.

Roadmap

Looking on the Copenhagen Suborbitals website, you can see that it has a fairly extensive roadmap, detailing milestones that must be passed before it finally straps somebody into a rocket.

HEAT-1X
The first successful launch by Copenhagen Suborbitals was in 2011 and featured the HEAT-1X rocket, carrying the Tycho Brahe mini-spacecraft and a human-sized crash test dummy within. The rocket itself was a hybrid epoxy/nitrous oxide fuel mix and was launched from a mobile platform at sea, marking the first time an amateur organization had performed such a sealaunch. Although the HEAT-1X mission was not entirely successful in terms of reaching its goals (the engine needed to be shut down early in the flight trajectory), there were enough useful lessons to be learned for future developments, particularly in terms of the operational and safety sides of things.

(Image courtesy of Copenhagen Suborbitals.)

Nexø I

The most recent tech demonstration from Copenhagen Suborbitals featured the Nexø I rocket, which was launched in July 2016. The Nexø I is a small-scale demonstrator that is intended to prove components and systems for the full-scale Spica rocket, which is the final version that Copenhagen Suborbitals intends to use in order to put an astronaut into space.

Nexø I is the first liquid bipropellant rocket launched by Copenhagen Suborbitals and uses a custom-built engine, dubbed the BMP5.

Jet vane and servo mount, designed in SOLIDWORKS. (Image courtesy of Copenhagen Suborbitals.)

Cutting costs with CAD

While designing a rocket may seem like a somewhat daunting task, Copenhagen Suborbitals does have access to something that the folks on the Mercury Redstone project did not: CAD software and simulation packages.

As readers of EngineersRule.com will know, access to CAD can reduce the time taken to bring designs to life, and simulation can help to identify problematic areas and implement changes before a design is even finalized—and, indeed, before a single piece of metal is cut.

Copenhagen Suborbitals has done just that and has been taking advantage of the capabilities offered by SOLIDWORKS from the original drawing and conception phase right through to CFD simulations.

The eDrawing image below shows the Launch Escape System (LES). The LES fits on top of the rocket and, in the event of an explosion, fires itself skywards, carrying the spacecraft capsule and occupants away from the explosion and to safety. Think of it like an ejector seat.

Launch escape system shown in SOLIDWORKS eDrawings. (Image courtesy of Copenhagen Suborbitals.)

Using SOLIDWORKS, Copenhagen Suborbitals has designed the capsule model, exported the drawings for laser cutting and performed Finite Element Method (FEM)analysis of structures to ensure that the capsule structure is capable of meeting the requirements for the launch environment.

Within SOLIDWORKS Simulation, it is relatively simple to model the g-loads experienced by a spacecraft or rocket during launch. It is a simple case of finding the maximum accelerations the rocket will experience and then adding those forces as a load within Simulation. Von Mises plots, displacement plots and the usual FEM plots can then be plotted, showing the stresses and strains that will affect the vehicle.

Any weaknesses shown within the plots can then be reinforced and designed out.

In the early days of spaceflight, such simulations would have been impossible, and engineers would have had to perform hideously complicated calculations by hand and then see if the calculations were accurate by building and testing the hardware.

FEM helps to reduce the design and build time significantly by providing visual cues as to where the weaknesses will occur in the structure.

In addition to the solid mechanical aspects of simulation, Copenhagen Suborbitals used SOLIDWORKS flow simulation to help pinpoint the center of pressure for its rockets. This is usually not a difficult thing to determine for basic geometries; however, the unique shape of the spacecraft capsule adds a layer of complexity to the design work. The Flow Simulation package in SOLIDWORKS enabled Copenhagen Suborbitals to determine the point where the torques acting on the spacecraft were equal to zero. That point is known as the center of pressure (CP).

Flow Simulation plot showing the torque values on a rocket of known CP. (Image courtesy of Copenhagen Suborbitals.)

Conclusions                                                                                                                                             

So there you have it. Thanks to CAD (and crowdfunding), you don’t need the budget of NASA in order to design, build and test rockets. But don’t take my word for it…there are many videos of Copenhagen Suborbitals’ test flights (and explosions) on the Web.

For example, the video below shows the Sapphire mission, which was a rocket launched by Copenhagen Suborbitals in order to demonstrate the guidance systems that are to be used in future projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcF5xNrb3HA

The video below shows the HEAT-2X static test bursting into flames.

On a personal level, the most impressive thing to me as an engineer is not how these guys have managed to design, build and test a rocket of this scale on such a small budget, but how they have managed to pull together these resources for a sea-based launch system. Add to that feat the fact that Copenhagen Suborbitals has managed to get the cooperation of air traffic control and various maritime services, and you can see that the whole project is a pretty awesome feat, from an operational and project management perspective.

But that’s fairly elementary. Even the most basic CAD packages allow for this functionality. It’s all very useful if you wish to create singular objects such as brackets or plastic molds or items of that nature, but what if you are building dynamic components that move in relation to each other? What if you want to build a machine? Can CAD help?

Of course, it can. And that’s where SOLIDWORKS motion studies come into play.

The motion features of the software can assist with a wide range of motion study depending on how complicated your requirements are, and they can be divided into three categories:

• Animation: If you simply wish to create some nice visuals for presentation or marketing without consideration of mass and gravity effects, then animation is for you.
• Basic Motion: For an extra layer of complexity that takes into consideration the effects of mass, springs, gravity and physical collision detection, then a Basic Motion study is more suited for your requirements.
• Motion Analysis: This is the top tier of motion study and takes into account a wider range of physical interactions such as impact effects, damping, force, momentum, etc.

In this article, we will take a look at the Animation and also the Motion Analysis categories. I will provide some links to Basic Motion videos at the end of the article.

Getting Started

You can perform the most basic level of animation at a part level. For our purposes here, we are going to skip that level and go straight on to the assembly mode, because we are interested in seeing how components visibly interact with each other.

All of the motion studies begin in the same way. You open up an assembly, load up the motion add-in, and then you can see the Model tab and the Motion Study tab at the bottom of the screen. Click the Motion Study tab to bring up the Motion Manager timeline view.

The Motion Study tab is highlighted in yellow at the bottom of the image.

This has invoked the motion study manager, and you are now ready to select your type of study, be it Animation, Basic Motion or Motion Analysis.

Animation

For each example, I will be using the assembly models found in the software’s tutorials. Each type of motion study will use a different model, and you can access these models yourself via Resources>Tutorials.

For the animation in this example, we will use a model of a plunger. I have no idea what it is a plunger of—or what it is meant to plunge—but you can find the model in the following path:

install_dir\samples\tutorial \motionstudies\animation\plunger.sldasm.

A plunger…for plunging.

The first step is to define the starting point/position.

Go into the MotionManager timeline and move the time indicator to the 0 seconds position. You can align the camera to your required starting position, too. For this example, I will just select an isometric view.

Next, we have to decide which part we want to animate and for how long we wish the movement to last.

In this example, we want the orange arm to move to a vertical position relative to the horizontal base.

We find the part labeled “arm left” in the list of parts within the MotionManager, and left-click the selection to highlight it. Then we drag the time bar from 0 seconds over to 5 seconds. This will define how long we want the movement to last. We then click the “add key” icon (shown with the red arrow in the image below), which will cause a horizontal bar to appear in the Motion Manager, in the “arm left” row, running from 0 seconds to 5 seconds. A keypoint (the diamond symbol) will appear at the end of 5 seconds in the “arm left” row. Make note of this little diamond as we will be using it later.

This has defined the part that we wish to move, and for how long we wish to move it.

Next, we will go into the main window and locate the actual part (the orange arm). We will then physically move it to the required position (upright). Once the final position is determined, we can press the “calculate” icon above the MotionManager tree (pictured below), and all of the horizontal rows will fill up with yellow lines, and the part will come to life in the main window.

If we want the component to end in the same place that it started, then we can do this by selecting the little keypoint diamond at 5 seconds, and pressing CTRL+C. Then, while still holding CTRL key down, we can drag the keypoint back to 2.5 seconds. We can then release the mouse button/pointer before releasing the CTRL key. If this step has been completed correctly, you will notice that a gap in the green changebar will appear between 2.5 seconds and 5 seconds.

Now we need to right-click the keypoint diamond at 0 seconds, and paste that to the 9 seconds point in the timeline. This will effectively copy and paste the start position later on in the timeline, which will let the animation know that it should return to its default position at the end of our defined time frame (9 seconds). Pressing the calculate icon again will recalculate the motion and display the animation in the main window, which will make gaps (representing a pause in the animation) appear for all components in the 2.5 seconds to 5 seconds region. The green changebar will extend to 9 seconds, indicating the end of this part of the animation. If this step has been performed correctly, then the plunger arm should move upward, pause, and then return to the default position.

The animated plunger will look like this:

You can change the position of components and also their appearance within the MotionManager. Simply drag the time bar to the point where you require the appearance change to take place, and change it there. For example, you may wish to hide a part, to change the texture, or make it translucent to show components beneath it.  The tutorial will show this process in more depth.

And, of course, if you wish to render your animation for a more realistic appearance, you can do so, and I have explained how to do this in another tutorial.

There is a nice video at the following link explaining the animation process in more detail:

Basic Motion

Motion Analysis

For this section, we will use a cam and follower system (similar to a valve lifter in a car engine), and we are going to examine the contact forces between the components as they change over time. We will then plot the results graphically.

This is the most advanced kind of motion study, and we have moved from the realm of mere animation into that of simulation.

First, open up the assembly model found in the following folder:   <install_dir>\samples\tutorial\MotionStudies\Valve_Cam.sldasm.

In the MotionManager, click the tab labeled “1200,” then select “Motion Analysis” as the type of study. Press the “Calculate” icon, which will bring the assembly to life as the motion is calculated.

Next, we will define the contact faces that we wish to analyze. Select Isometric view in the main window, and then click the “results and plots” icon at the top of the MotionManager. This will open up a new window labeled “Results Property Manager,” where you will see several drop-down menu boxes.

In the first menu box (category), select “Forces”; in the second menu box (subcategory), select “Contact Force”; and for the third menu box (result component), select “Magnitude.” You can take a few minutes to look at these different options after the tutorial. This is where your type of analysis is determined.

Finally, there is a component selection field. Click on that, and then go into the main graphic window and select the two faces that are in contact and which we will be analyzing. These are the faces of the rocker and the camshaft (pictured below).

The curved contact faces are highlighted in blue.

For good measure, I have also included a displacement plot that shows the displacement cycle in relation to the reaction forces.

What we can see from these plots is that the reaction force increases just as the cam begins to raise the follower. This is to be expected as the spring is starting to undergo compression. There is also a second greater peak occurring as the rocker passes the cam and begins to lower. This is due to the acceleration caused by the spring relaxing.

Plot 1 is the reaction force plot and Plot 2 is displacement.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words and a video (with plots) is worth about ten thousand, I have recorded the motion and the plots in a video below, so you can see exactly how the force and displacement relates to the physical movement of the model.

Comparing Studies

OK, so that’s all very nice. We have some plots, but what if we wish to change the parameters of the components and see the effects of those changes?

First, go to the “1200” tab at the bottom of MotionManager and right-click it, then press Duplicate.

Rename the new duplicated tab as “2000” because we are going to step up the speed of the motor to 2000 RPM and see what happens.

Now drag the time bar back to the 0 seconds point, then go into the component tree in MotionManager and find the RotaryMotor2 component. Right-click it, and select Edit Feature. Now change the motion from 1200 RPM to 2000 PRM, and press the green tick icon to close that window. Press Calculate to recalculate with the new parameters.

Now you can see in the animation that as the cam passes, lifting the rocker, the rocker bounces back onto the cam. (A video of the bouncing effect can be seen here: https://youtu.be/2jVQVtZ9HGg.) The spring is actually losing contact with the cam, and as it bounces the spring is compressed again, and it releases that energy back into the rocker, causing the rocker to bounce. The bounce is visible in the displacement plot as a second peak each cycle.

Use the Force

This is caused by the faster rotation. The contact force is actually at zero when the rocker leaves the cam, so we need to ensure that the cam does not lose contact with the rocker. We can do this by altering the spring constant. Increasing the spring constant should allow us to maintain the motion.

To do this, go into the component tree in the MotionManager, right-click “LinearSpring2” and press Edit Feature.

Here the spring properties are visible. Currently, the value for k (spring constant) is set at 0.1 N/mm. We will increase this value 100fold to 10.00 N/mm. Now click the green tick to close the window and press Calculate again.

Now you can see in the new plots that the bounce has been eliminated in the displacement plot and that there is also an increased force from the spring that ensures that the rocker remains in contact with the cam, regardless of the new speed.

Final Thoughts

And there you have it. You are well on your way to creating pretty animations and also complex motion studies.

We have deliberately skipped over the Basic Motion section—purely because the skills required for Basic Motion lay somewhere in between Animation and Motion Analysis. If you can do both Animation and a full analysis, then doing the Basic Motion study should be very easy for you. And besides, where is the fun in being shown everything! One of the reasons I love doing these articles is because it forces me to sit there and relearn features that I may have not used for a while. It blows the cobwebs away.

There are lots of cool videos on YouTube showing the Basic Motion in more detail if you wish to look for yourself.

Here is one of my favorite videos involving a Geneva Wheel mechanism. Part One shows the creation of the wheel from scratch, whereas Part Two (linked below) shows how to perform the Basic Motion study on the mechanism.

Of course, the examples in this article can be found in the SOLIDWORKS tutorial section of the software. They provide a good foundation of the skills needed for motion simulation and animation.

I definitely recommend searching on YouTube for other videos on this subject, and trying to replicate the video examples for yourself. YouTube is a great (free) resource for this type of thing, and every video will add to your growing skill set as an engineer.

Until next time!