- [Instructor] The Solidworks simulation tool
is an add-in which gives you the capability
to carry out a finite element analysis
from within your Solidworks environment.
This video shows you how to invoke the add-in
and become familiar with the new menus
that are now available to you.
We open Solidworks for the first time
by double-clicking on the icon.
And we go to file,
open,
and choose our starting geometry,
which is con_rod_baseline,
and I put this on the desktop.
To activate the Solidworks simulation,
we go to tools,
add-ins,
and check the box next to the simulation add-in.
So this will launch the simulation works add-in.
We want to be able to start the Simulation Works add-in
every time we run Solidworks.
If we click this checkbox on the right,
that will make sure Simulation is invoked
every time we start up a new database.
So we click okay.
And after a brief pause,
we see we've got two new tabs.
Simulation tab, we've got the analysis preparation tab.
Now we can drive the analysis workflow from either
the simulation drop down,
we can see the workflow here,
or from the simulation tab.
The simulation tab at the moment is all grayed out.
We just see the availability to create a new study.
So let's click on this and create a new study.
The new study form pops up.
Let's give this a name.
Conrod static analysis.
We can see a range of analysis types available.
Down in here we have thermal, buckling,
fatigue, non-linear and so on.
We're going to be using the default, which is static.
Check okay.
And now we see a new feature tree
with FEA entities
and a study tab labeled conrod static analysis.
So you can see we're going to have the ability
to create connections, fixtures, external loads, and so on.
We also have a new set of icons
which we can also use to control the simulation.
We'll be working in traditional English units
of inch, pounds, seconds for the conrod model.
We need to set the simulation default to this system.
Go to the top menu bar
and select simulation.
Pick options from the drop down.
Go to default options.
Make sure we have set up English IPS system.
Then just check that we've got inch for length,
and PSI for pressure and stress.
Click okay.
At this point, we can just save our Solidworks model.
Say file, save as, then we're going to call it
baseline underscore one.
Click save.
Now, in this video, we've seen
how to activate the Solidworks Simulation add-in
and set up an initial study.
We're now all ready to start building out the FEA model.