Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability – Visualization

The "Green Movement" is commonly referred as the buzz word for making products with lower carbon footprint with less energy and reduced air and water pollutants; in this series we are covering how SOLIDWORKS Visualization tool is used to give our customers insight of their design Sustainability affect on the environment product lifecycle.

How does SOLIDWORKS Visualization help our customers become Eco-friendly designers?

After Selecting:

• Material Properties
• Location of Manufacturing of Products
• Where the Product will be used
• Transportation of Products

Sustainability calculates Environmental factors such as carbon footprint and energy consumption used to produce the product, by selecting the Assembly Visualization icon from the Evaluate tab SOLIDWORKS immediately gives the user visual feedback, then select the Sustainability-Total Carbon column to sort identifying graphically the worst contributor's which impacts the environment the most as shown below.

• Sorting a list of components by various properties
• Applying colors to the model to help you visualize and compare the value of the sorting property for each component
• Hiding some components so you can focus on others
• Creating and sorting by an equation
• Editing property values
• Saving the sorted list to an external file

Visualization feedback can be used to look for similar materials that could soften the Environment Impact of the products as shown below.

As we make changes the dashboard updates to show if we have reduced the impact or made it worst, the dashboard allows the user to view the change of the Environment Impact.

With a single click, as shown above, we can capture the changes to a customizable report that will clearly show the design changes and the final impact to the Environmental.

*Sustainability can also be used in conjunction with SOLIDWORKS Simulation.

**Visualization function is not included with Sustainability Xpress.

Dassault Systems "SOLIDWORKS" has been recognized for their efforts in meeting the Green Certification requirements.

We hope this series gives you some good insight to the new SOLIDWORKS Sustainability product, please check back to the CATI Blog as the Dedicated Support Team will continue posting new series of articles every month that go further into the details of many of the SOLIDWORKS tools. All of these articles will be stored in the category of Daily Dose…..of SOLIDWORKS Support and links to each article with their release date are listed below:

• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Overview (Bryan Pawlak 10/15/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Task Pane (George Branes 10/19/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Parts ( John Van Engen 10/20/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Assemblies (Blake Cokinis 10/21/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Custom Materials (Neil Bucalo 10/22/15)
• Measuring Environmental Impact with SOLIDWORKS Sustainability– Visualization (Ron Flaugh 10/26/15)

Ronnie Flaugh CSWS-TSO

Technical Analyst

Computer Aided Technology LLC.