- [Narrator] SolidWorks has the ability to modify
individual dimensions inside of a model,
to adjust for a factor of safety or a certain amount
of force applied to a part.
To get started, let's go ahead and click
on SimulationExpress, click on "next",
and down here, you can see we're going to add a fixture.
I'm going to go ahead and just choose
this face right here.
We're going to do a very simple model,
just to show how this works.
Click on "next".
We're going to be applying a force,
right there on top of that.
We're going to go 500, facing down,
click "OK", looks good.
Next, choose a material, let's try 1020 steel,
apply enclose, click on "next".
Go ahead and run that simulation,
and let's go ahead and see what happens.
Flexing down, as expected, click "yes", looks good.
Now, it says my factor of safety is 1.69.
And, a lot of times when I'm working on designs,
I'm looking for a factor of safety of about three.
So you can see we're a little bit under design.
You click on the stress, as you can see here,
there's a lot of stress on that area, top and bottom,
not much in the center.
So, we're in a good place to start iterating on this design.
So, down here, you can see I'm done reviewing the results,
and, now I'm getting ready to optimize.
Right, so I can generate reports prior to doing that,
if not, jump down to "optimize" and it's going to ask us
if I'd like to optimize my model, and I say "yes".
Click on "next".
And now I'm going to go and choose one of these dimensions.
So, here it is, I can zoom in over here.
I don't really want to change the width,
but I can change the height.
So here's my height, here' my model dimension,
here's it's current value, and go ahead and click on "OK".
Now, I'm going to give it a range of either higher or lower,
so in this case here, I have a minimum value of 1/4",
but that's really not what we want.
We want that to be .5, which it starts at,
and we can go as thick as, let's say, one inch,
that should be okay.
As far as our constraints,
we don't really have a constraint,
but we do have some other options here.
Right, so we can add a constraint, as far as
a factor of safety, or max displacement, or max stress.
So in this case here, I'm looking for a factor of safety.
Right, and I'm saying I'd like to have a factor of safety
of above 3.0.
Those are my options, right?
Now you can of course change this to maximum stresses,
or anything else like that, but in this case,
I want a factor of safety of three,
and the only thing I'm giving it is the ability
to change the thickness of the part.
We could make this much more complicated if we wanted to,
and be able to change the width and height and thickness,
and everything else.
But to show a very simple example of how this works,
I'm only changing the thickness, and I'm only looking
for a factor of safety of three.
Go ahead and click on "run".
And, it's going to go ahead and run five scenarios,
by changing that thickness, and seeing what happens.
So the first one it does, it goes to the maximum thickness,
and says "Well, let's try that out".
Now let's make it a little bit thinner, and then it says,
"Hey, by the way, we've solved the problem,
and we've decided that we've come up with an optimal
factor of safety, and here it is".
My initial value was 1/2", factor of safety of 1.6.
The optimal value is .67, and it's a factor of safety
of very close to three.
So let's go ahead and click on the optimal value,
looks great.
And, we've now solved our problem.
And actually, we haven't done it, SolidWorks did it for us.
It figured out the factor of safety of three,
and it determined what the closest value of that thickness
needed to be, to get to that value.
So that's how you run a factor of safety analysis,
and optimization, and iteration, inside of SolidWorks.