SolidWorks Simulation Professional FEA Software

Additional functionality over SolidWorks Simulation

In addition to the design validation capabilities included with SolidWorks Simulation, SolidWorks Simulation Professional offers drop test and impact, design optimization, thermal heat transfer, thermal stress, vibration, buckling, simulate repeat loading, fatigue analysis and pressure vessel design.

Regardless of industry application, from aerospace to medical, SolidWorks Simulation provides significant product quality benefits; enabling engineers to detect design problems in less time than a prototype could be built.

Features & Benefits

With SolidWorks Simulation Professional, you can:

• Understand the effects of temperature changes. Temperature variations encountered by mechanical parts and structures can greatly influence product performance.
  • Study conduction, convection, and radiation heat transfer.
    
  • Support isotropic, orthotropic, and temperature-dependent material properties.
• Evaluate natural frequencies or critical buckling loads and their corresponding mode shapes. Often overlooked, inherent vibration modes in structural components or mechanical support systems can shorten equipment life and cause unexpected failures.
  • Study isotropic and orthotropic material behavior.
  • Measure inplane effects on stiffness.
    
  • Loads for buckling and inplane stiffening include: force, pressure, gravity, and centrifugal.
• Optimize designs based on your defined criteria. Design optimization automatically determines the most optimal design based on your specified criteria.
  • Base constraint criteria on static, thermal, frequency, or buckling analysis.
  • Base objective criteria on dimensions, mass, or volume.
• Simulate virtual drop tests on a variety of flooring surfaces. In the event that your part or assembly might be dropped, find out whether or not it can survive the fall intact.
  • Simulate the impact onto various rigid and flexible flooring surfaces, such as concrete, carpet, and hard wood.
  • See the interactions between various parts in an assembly
    after impact
• Study the effects of cyclic loading and fatigue operating conditions. See the effects of fatigue on the overall lifecycle of your part or assembly to find out how long it will last, and what design changes can extend its working life.
  • Use rainflow charts to help determine the effects of small stress
    cycles in loading history and possible effects of infinite life.
  • Import load history data from real physical tests to define
    loading events.
• See how your assemblies will move before you build them. Using the physics-based motion simulation of SolidWorks Motion, you can study part interferences and gain insight into the real-world working conditions of your SolidWorks assemblies.
  • Seamlessly transfer motion loads from SolidWorks Motion to SolidWorks Simulation for stress analysis.
  • Determine power consumption and how contacting parts behave.
  • Lay out linkages, develop cams, and understand gear drives.
• Pressure Vessel Design. In a Pressure Vessel Design study, you combine the results of static studies with the desired factors. Each static study has a different set of loads that produce corresponding results. These loads can be dead loads, live loads (approximated by static loads), thermal loads, seismic loads, and so on. The Pressure Vessel Design study combines the results of the static studies algebraically using a linear combination or the square root of the sum of the squares (SRSS).
  
  When using a solid mesh, the software provides a stress linearization tool to separate bending and membrane components. One can separate and linearize membrane and bending stresses between two locations in a sectional plot of pressure vessel study. The results can be used in accordance with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) International Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code. The functionality is used for solid meshes only. For shells, you can plot and list membrane and bending stresses separately.