- [Instructor] In this example, I've built an assembly using
the part we've been working on in this course
as well as some washers and some bolts.
Now I have simplified the bolts and put everything together
here, and it's a pretty straightforward and simple assembly,
but you do have quite a few parts here.
Now I want to run a simulation on this part.
The only problem is SimulationXpress only works
on individual parts, and that's not going to really work
for us, because we have about nine parts here,
so let's go ahead and save this thing out as one part.
Go up here to file.
Come down here to save as and instead of an assembly,
you have the ability to save it as a part itself,
and you have the option of saving faces,
components and the exterior or all components.
I'm going to choose all components,
and I'm going to append the end of this thing called part.
There it is and click on save, and now we've saved
this out as an individual part, so here's our assembly.
Let's go ahead and just close that out,
and then come up here and open that part.
You can see here now we have a multibody part,
so there's nine solid bodies all in here,
and to analyze this inside of SimulationXpress,
I need to combine these things together.
No problem though, we've got a great tool for that
under direct editing click on combine, and I would like
to add the original body, the washers, the bolts.
Let's just make 'em all one body, click okay,
and now you can see here there's no more multiple bodies.
We have combined everything together
into one individual body which now, of course,
I can run a simulation on, pretty handy.
So go up here to evaluate, simulation, come down over here
and just go through the basic setup we've been using so far.
English, okay, next.
Let's go ahead and define some fixtures.
So add a fixture, and I'm going to go ahead and fix
the bolts themselves, so here they are.
Grab those bolts, click on okay, click on next.
Let's go ahead and add a force,
and I'm going to go ahead and choose a selected direction.
I'm going to choose the top plane,
and I'm going to choose this face right here.
There it is, click there first,
There and there, and I want to switch the direction,
and I'm going to go ahead and add 1,000 pounds going down,
so there it is facing down.
I have the hole and that outside surface there.
That looks pretty good, click on okay, click on next.
As far as the material, let's go ahead and choose
this alloy steel or actually a cast alloy steel.
Now that's the one limitation we have here,
because, obviously, the bolts and washers might not
be the same material as the bracket itself, so you do need
to pick one or the other of the materials you're going to
be choosing, but you're going to get pretty close.
So go ahead and choose alloy steel or cast alloy steel,
apply, click on close, and now it's all the same material.
Click on next and then go ahead and run the simulation.
Now this is a problem.
It says meshing failed and it's terminating the analysis,
and that's okay.
I was expecting something like this to happen.
Click on okay now and we can go back
over here and look really closely.
So as you can see there's very fine features between
or very small gaps between the parts.
Let's go back and look at the mesh.
Let's go ahead and reduce the mesh size,
change the mesh density.
Let's go ahead and make it a little bit finer,
click on okay, and let's try it one more time.
It says mesh failed again, so let's see
what's causing the problem here.
Well it didn't really like that combine feature,
so let's go back and reduce the mesh size one more time,
put it as fine as we possibly can.
This time it worked, so click on next, run simulation,
and yes it does look good, click on yes continue.
Our factor of safety has gone down quite a bit.
It's only .13, so okay let's click
on the stresses and see what we're at.
You can see here, we're getting
a drastically different result than we did before.
Over here, you can see these bolts are
where all the force is being applied, and you can see
we're forcing some material around here holding onto those,
and we're getting a completely different deflection plot
as it did before.
You can see how it's kind of pulling the top
of this out a little bit, so you're getting
a lot better results here by combining components together.
Now it's not perfect, obviously, and it'd be better to run
this analysis as a bolted connection inside
of a real SOLIDWORKS simulation.
However if you don't have that package,
this is a pretty good alternative,
and you get pretty good results.
You do have to make a couple of assumptions,
but overall you get some pretty interesting results,
and right here we've got a pretty nice design
and a good way to review it.
So that is how you take an assembly.
You bring it into a part.
You then combine all those individual parts together
to be one individual part, and then you can run an analysis
and get pretty good results from it.