Carry out fatigue analysis and predict component fatigue failures during the design phase with CAD-embedded SOLIDWORKS Simulation. You can then adjust your design or define a preventive maintenance schedule to reduce warranty costs and maximize product life.
Fatigue Analysis Overview
Fatigue analysis examines how repeated or random load cycles can cause structural failure (so called metal fatigue). SOLIDWORKS Simulation enables designers to take two, complementary approaches to design analysis:
- Design for Strength: Traditionally in failure analysis, designers consider the ultimate strength of their components; but in-service load is rarely static in nature as there is usually a cyclical variation.
- Design for Life: Adding this approach, you can utilize finite element analysis (FEA) to predict and address causes of failure.
Easily determine and trace the impact of your design changes on component performance while you design, using the fast, efficient Trend Tracker capability in SolidWorks Simulation.
Tightly integrated with SolidWorks CAD, SolidWorks Simulation Trend Tracker can be a regular part of your design process, reducing the need for costly prototypes, eliminating rework and delays, and saving time and development costs.
Trend Tracker Overview
3D simulation gives product engineers technical insights they can use for better design decisions. With the analysis results, they can change a material, a thickness, or the geometry of a component to meet not just the product requirements, but achieve better performance and quality.
The Trend Tracker functionality of SolidWorks Simulation helps product engineers quickly detect trends in different iterations of a static study, showing results that compare a baseline analysis to subsequent iterations.
- Trend Journal lists details about the baseline and every iteration
- Graphs show trending for important results quantities—view one of the default graphs or add a tracked data graph
- Gallery shows displacement and stress plots for every iteration
- Rollback function allows you to restore the model to a specific iteration
- Add iterations automatically or manually when you run studies or design scenarios
The powerful Design Study tools in SOLIDWORKS Simulation enable product engineers to evaluate specific performance and usage scenarios during design and perform design optimization using a uniform workflow.
Design Study Overview
Design is an iterative process as product engineers continuously modify the design until it meets acceptance criteria defined by safety, cost, performance, convenience, and shape. To optimize product development, SOLIDWORKS Simulation provides powerful tools to automate these iterations and find the best design earlier.
The Evaluation Design Study enables you to evaluate multiple scenarios for your design—you specify discrete values for each variable and use sensors as constraints. The software runs the study using various combinations of the values, and then reports the output for each combination so you can find the best design scenario for your product.
You can evaluate a vast number of problems with a Design Study:
- Define multiple variables using any simulation parameters or driving global variable
- Define multiple constraints using sensors
- Define multiple goals using sensors
- Analyze models without simulation results (For example, minimize the mass of an assembly with variables for model dimensions and density, and the constraint of volume.)
- Evaluate design choices by using different materials as a variable
Design Study uses the parametric, feature-based modeling and automatic regeneration capabilities of SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS Simulation to automate the optimization process. Based on the Design of Experiments method, the study finds the optimum design according to goals or to objective functions, design variables, and constraints. The analysis runs iterations of the values and reports the optimum combination to meet your specified goal.
