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

Summary

Meshing is at the heart of the finite element simulation method. To get accurate results, you must rely on a high-quality mesh and the judicious use of mesh control. For this reason, we used the various sections of this chapter to offer a short overview of procedures for the mesh refinement of different elements. Overall, we did the following:

  • We revisited the discretization of truss and beam structures to demonstrate how their mesh control can be deployed to reduce computational time.
  • We documented the idea of the mesh convergence study and showed how it can be employed to facilitate the accuracy of results.
  • We examined the benefit of mesh control for two-dimensional and three-dimensional elements and highlighted the procedure to strike balance between the accuracy of results and gaining computational efficiency.

As this summary marks the end of the book, it is worth examining how the book has progressed. In Chapter 1, Getting Started with Finite Element...