Book Image

Practical Finite Element Simulations with SOLIDWORKS 2022

By : Khameel B. Mustapha
Book Image

Practical Finite Element Simulations with SOLIDWORKS 2022

By: Khameel B. Mustapha

Overview of this book

SOLIDWORKS is a dominant computer-aided design (CAD) software for the 3D modeling, designing, and analysis of components. This book helps you get to grips with SOLIDWORKS Simulation, which is a remarkable and integral part of SOLIDWORKS predominantly deployed for advanced product performance assessment and virtual prototyping. With this book, you'll take a hands-on approach to learning SOLIDWORKS Simulation with the help of step-by-step guidelines on various aspects of the simulation workflow. You'll begin by learning about the requirements for effective simulation of parts and components, along with the idealization of physical components and their representation with finite element models. As you progress through the book, you'll find exercises at the end of each chapter, and you'll be able to download the geometry models used in all the chapters from GitHub. Finally, you’ll discover how to set up finite element simulations for the static analysis of components under various types of loads, and with different types of materials, from simple isotropic to composite, and different boundary conditions. By the end of this SOLIDWORKS 2022 book, you'll be able to conduct basic and advanced static analyses with SOLIDWORKS Simulation and have practical knowledge of how to best use the family of elements in the SOLIDWORKS Simulation library.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: An Introduction to SOLIDWORKS Simulation
6
Section 2: SOLIDWORKS Simulation with Shell and Solid Elements
10
Section 3: Advanced SOLIDWORKS Simulation with Complex Material and Loading Behavior

An analysis of composite beams

This section details our first case study, which is related to the analysis of a curved composite beam acting as an elastic spring.

Through this case study, you will also become familiar with how to create a custom orthotropic composite material and assign its properties to a collection of composite plies. Furthermore, you will become familiar with the effect of fiber orientations on the behavior of composite structures. Moreover, you will learn the difference between the types of stress available for analysis with composite materials and the type of failure criteria used to estimate their factor of safety. Also covered briefly is the procedure to modify SOLIDWORKS Simulation global settings.

Let's get started.

Problem statement

Figure 8.4a shows a multipurpose prosthetic designed with a fiber-reinforced composite [5]. The structural component of the prosthetic consists of two major segments, BA and AC, as highlighted in Figure 8...