Eat all the holiday snacks or “junk food” you want and stay in shape!!!!

Aha I wish! But not exactly! Sorry, I’m talking about sketch geometry.

If you sometimes find it confusing, while working with sketches, that changing sketch dimensions disproportionally reshapes your sketch before you’re ready, here's a tip that you should find helpful.

Turn off “Automatic Solve.” This will allow you to change several dimensions on a sketch without having the sketch geometry automatically update. I find this extremely helpful when I've created complicated profiles that I'm going to use in a sweep or revolve!

See TOOLS - SKETCH SETTINGS - AUTOMATIC SOLVE

Merry Christmas!!!

Simulation Advisor

If you have been too apprehensive to learn how to use analysis tools like Finite Element Analysis (FEA), or, you felt you did not have the time to learn how to use the software for performing such analysis, then you may want to check out the Simulation Advisor in the Solidworks Simulation 2010 release. Simulation Advisor is a set of tools that guide you through the analysis process. By answering a series of questions, these tools collect the necessary data to help you perform your analysis. Simulation Advisor includes:

• Study Advisor. Recommends study types and outputs to expect. Helps you define sensors and creates studies automatically. 
• Bodies and Materials Advisor. Lets you specify how to treat bodies within a part or an assembly and apply materials to components. 
• Interactions Advisor. Defines internal interactions between bodies in the model as well as external interactions between the model and the environment. Interactions can include loads, fixtures, connectors, and contacts. 
• Mesh and Run Advisor. Helps you specify the mesh and run the study. 
• Results Advisor. Provides tips for interpreting and viewing the output of the simulation. Also, helps determine if frequency or buckling might be areas of concern.

Simulation Advisor works with the SolidWorks Simulation interface by starting the appropriate Property Managers and linking to online help topics for additional information. Simulation Advisor leads you through the analysis workflow from determining the study type through analyzing the simulation output. By following the workflow, you use, depending on your requirements, each of the individual Advisors.

To start the Simulation Advisor, click Study (Simulation CommandManager). The Simulation Advisor tab appears in the Task Pane.

To access individual advisors: 

• Click Study (Simulation CommandManager) to access the Study Advisor. 
• Click Fixtures (Simulation CommandManager) to access the Fixtures section of the Interactions Advisor. 
• Click External Loads (Simulation CommandManager) to access the Loads section of the Interactions Advisor. 
• Click Connections (Simulation CommandManager) to access the Connections section of the Interactions Advisor. 
• Click Results (Simulation CommandManager) to access the Results Advisor.

Just Another Face in the Crowd?

Very often designers and engineers create multiple versions of a particular design to look at different options or design alternatives. Keeping these different versions seperate AND knowing their differences can quickly become a problem. SolidWorks has tools for very quickly and easily comparing two design documents against each other.

SolidWorks can compare the two documents, their features or their respective geometry and immediately return a graphic analysis of the results which can be saved as a PDF and printed. You can even compare the BOM's of similar assemblies! In just a few seconds both models are displayed dividing the screen with their images and the comparison data.

Simply select Compare Documents, Compare Features, Compare GeometryCompare BOMs and you will literally see the difference!

Available in SolidWorks Professional and Premium.

SolidWorks World 2010 Hotel Room Cut-Off Date: January 7th

The cut-off date to reserve your room with a select local hotel (in Anaheim) at a discounted rate for SolidWorks World 2010 is January 7th, 2010. Although it is still a few weeks away, it is quickly approaching. Please do not wait to reserve your room.

Details have been posted over the weekend at the SolidWorks World 2010 micro-site HERE.

Bend Lines in a Lofted Bend

So you have created a lofted bend that yields a great flat pattern only to find out that there is no bend information associated with it. What happened?

In order to have your bend lines created within SolidWorks for this particular feature, you need to make sure that "each profile includes corresponding curved and straight elements." To clarify this, not only do you need to have the same amount of "breaks" in each sketch creating the lofted bend, but those breaks need to be connected to like items, (radii has a corresponding radii, line has a corresponding line.)

Here is the sketch of the base, or squared portion of our halved square-round:

As you can see, there are 2 radii and 3 straight line segments.

In this first example, the half square round has the appropriate amount of breaks, yet the line types do not match up. This yields a correct flat pattern yet at the same time does not give us bend line information:

(Note: For dimensioning along an arc, check out our other posts!)

Here we have corrected our "round" sketch to contain the appropriate amount of arcs and lines:

Easy as that.

Flow Freezing

Did you know there is an option that will help speed up a Flow Simulation analysis that includes heat transfer?

Under the Advanced tab you can specify parameters controlling the procedure of saving the CPU time by freezing (i.e., taking from the previous iteration) values of all flow parameters, with the exception of fluid and solid temperatures and fluid substances concentrations (if several substances are considered), which converge more slowly than the other flow parameters, so the temperature and concentrations are calculated at each iteration. This option will be useful when a steady-state or time-dependent problem with substantial heat transfer and/or fluid substances propagation is solved.

To invoke flow freezing, click the Value cell of the Flow Freezing row and select either the Periodic or Permanent strategy for flow freezing.

Vote for Your Top Ten Wish List Items

Matt Lombard is asking you to visit his blog and vote for the top 10 SolidWorks enhancements you would like to see in the next version.

There are a lot of great suggestions you can give your feedback on such as:  full version compatibility, the ability to read Catia files directly, and being able to reorder groups of features not in folders, just to name a few.

Head on over to Matt's blog to vote!