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

Analysis of three-dimensional components with mixed beam and shell elements

This section details our first case study, which centers around an analysis that involves a mixture of beam elements and shell elements.

As you will recall, we pointed out the attributes of the beam element in Chapter 3, Analyses of Beams and Frames, while those of the shell elements were described in Chapter 5, Analyses of Axisymmetric Bodies. Although their dimensionality is different (one being a line-based element and the other being a triangular element), both of these elements as implemented in SOLIDWORKS Simulation have six degrees of freedom (DOFs) per node. Notably, these DOFs are the three translational displacements along the X, Y, and Z axes, and the three rotational displacements about these three axes. Putting these two elements together in the first case study, therefore, represents a good starting point in the exploration of analyses with mixed elements. Overall, the compatibility of the...