Reviewing boundary conditions

Thank you, Richard Wand (MJ Engineering – http://mjengineering.com/) for showing this cool trick!! And thank you Tony Tsao (SOLIDWORKS Corporation) for reminding me to blog about this after the Simulation Tips and Tricks Webinar!!

In numerous instances, I have had the need to revisit some of the conditions that I set up on a simulation study. For instance, going back and checking what I applied on one bolt!! Or checking the value of a pressure load that I set up on the model. Usually, the quickest way to do this would be to right click on the item in the simulation tree, and select Details. This would pop-up a window that shows the definition of that item.

What is cool is the fact that you can lock this pop-up window down using the push-pin on the top right corner of the window.

Thereafter, clicking any entity on the simulation tree would bring up its corresponding definition in the pop-up window. Try doing this by walking through some of the items you have already set up in your Simulation tree (such as connections, external loads, fixtures, etc.).

Another way of getting  a quick summary of any portion of the pre-processing is to generate a report and choose to only include a specific item (such as external loads) in the report. Publishing the report would list out all the external loads that were setup in the study.

Remember: Reviewing boundary conditions is a necessary step before running the analysis, and when troubleshooting erroneous results!!