Customizable Furniture by Tabluka

Tabluka is a UK based company that sells configurable and customizable furniture and other home accessories that can be designed to the customers’ specification over the web.

Tabluka are currently using DriveWorks Pro Administrator, DriveWorks Pro Autopilot and DriveWorks Pro Live to allow their consumers to directly configure their own perfect table and accessories online.

The Benefits gained from using DriveWorks Design Automation and Sales Configurator software:

· All the engineering data for every new customer’s design  is automated by DriveWorks eradicating the need for manual creation of .dxf files.
· Automated BOM and packing list generated for manufacture when an order is placed.

Read more and see the fantastic Tabluka forms here

First, let’s discuss the problem to be solved.  This cabinet encloses logic and distribution circuits for natural gas.  One of the requirements is that, should a leak occur in a fitting, the gas cannot pool and accumulate above a certain concentration, and to that end we have to assess whether we need fans, and if so, to spec their size, number, placement, and determine the venting scheme to ensure good overall circulation.  So you can see we’ll be dealing with very low pressures, and very low injection mass-flow rates;  We have a very large meshed enclosure area,  buoyancy effects,  and this design task would likely require several time-dependent runs, in addition to steady-state runs.  All of this will result in very long computation times.  But we cannot simply ignore the leaks and gaps – we are actually counting on some them for our venting and pressure-equalization, and if we ignore them in the Sim, we risk fooling ourselves about the real-world behavior of this cabinet.

This is probably one of the most annoying problem-formulation jobs that you will come across in the world of Flow Simulation.  It’s the nature of the beast.  The cabinet is an assembly of about a dozen sheet metal parts.  The designer has taken advantage of every SolidWorks feature in the book, to make sure he has gaps and clearances to promote easy fit-up and assembly;  He has bend reliefs and corner treatments to ensure his models are producible and manufacturing-ready;  And there’s just way more detail than we need, and mostly detail of the wrong kind.

Gap size, Mesh size, and Time

The gating factor in how many mesh elements we need, and how long this study takes to run, is the smallest hole or gap through which we need to accurately flow gas.  Because of improvements in the mesher in SolidWorks 2012, we can mesh narrow gaps and channels with as few as 3 cells, (whole or partial, doesn’t matter), across the gap.  More is better, of course, and I usually like to shoot for 4 or 5 cells, on average, but the minimum you can get away with is 3.  Fewer than that, and the wall-function in each cell that accounts for boundary-layer affect will not correct properly for the presence of 2 nearby walls.

Fortunately for our Gas Control Panel study, the user has been amazingly consistent, and all of his rips, bend reliefs, and fit-up gaps are 0.064” across.  To guarantee 3 elements across such a gap, our smallest cell size must be smaller than .032”, (and I’d rather see it closer to maybe .024”).   There’s no way we can mesh the entire enclosure with cells of that size.  With roughly 15.6 cubic feet of enclosed space, we would need about 824,000,000 cells.  So of course, we’ll use a larger global mesh size, and allow the Advanced Narrow Channel Refinement to step the cell size down as you approach the gaps.  The image below shows an attempt to mesh this problem, using the manufacturing-ready parts, with the minimum acceptable cell refinement at the corners.

You can see I’ve formulated this as an External flow domain, and the basic mesh cells are 1” square.  This does NOT yet contain the local mesh refinements we should place in around the location of each leaky gas fitting. This mesh has over 2 million cells, and required 15 minutes just to compute the mesh.  This size mesh actually is acceptable for a steady-state solution – that is, if you are willing to wait 4 to 6 hours for each studied configuration.

But we can do better.  And I especially want you to consider what happens when you try to run this mesh in a Time-Dependent study.  Any time-dependent study will start out with a time-step of microseconds, (or even smaller!), and then gradually increase the time-step size as the initial conditions have a chance to soak-out across the domain.  But there is a limit to how large the time-step will grow to, and that limit is a function of the smallest mesh cell in the study, divided by the maximum velocity of gas flow anywhere in the problem.  See the problem with that?  Even though your leakage velocities will typically be very low, those tiny cells in the gaps are going to force the time-dependent study to baby-step through time.  If you do some hand calculations and determine that your 1-exchange time constant is around 15 minutes, the time dependent study will want to run for about 3 days, and you’ll have to manually set the time step larger to get productive work done.

Idealizing the Problem

I’ll present my favorite tactics for idealizing a problem like this – but feel free to adapt to your own requirements for file-management, collaborating with other users, etc.  Just keep this big picture work-flow in mind:  We are going to replace the 12+ sheet metal parts with a simple, single hollow cube.  Then we inscribe the flow-specific details into the interior faces of that cube, and we can suppress the messy, ‘real’ wall geometry.

The clean, simple enclosure turns the problem into an Internal Flow study.  Everywhere along the corners and seams of the cube where there would have been leaks, we create a SPLIT LINE feature to delineate that leakage area – BUT, we make the leakage faces 10x wider than they really would be.  This will allow us to mesh with much larger elements.

On each ‘leaking’ split-face, we define a  Environmental Pressure to ambient.  Then we apply a Perforated Plate treatment to these faces, where the face area is only 10% open, and the pressure loss rule is defined as Rectangular Slots,  .064” wide, (and, I used 8” length as a guessed average).

You will still want a local mesh refinement on all the ‘leak’ faces to ensure a minimum of 3 cells across the face, but thanks to our use of a 0.10 open area ratio, and the 10x wider faces, we can now shoot for a minimum cell size of 0.32”, (I’ll get greedy and use 0.24”).

Tactical Details

The first step is to make sure that your work does not mess up the designer, manufacturing engineer, draftsman, so you at least want to do all this work on your own Configuration of the assembly;

1)   Create a new Configuration of the top-level assembly.

2)   Insert a new part file to serve as the simplified enclosure.

3)   Size and shape the new Enclosure model to match up with the existing sheet metal walls.

Your mileage will vary at this step.  You might want to keep the new enclosure, sync’ed up with the actual sheet metal parts by preserving top-down relations.  If you do that, you will not be able to Suppress the real sheet metal parts later on, but you might decide the associativity is worth preserving.  Or, you might use the other parts to exactly size and shape the enclosure, but then strip out the external references so this part file is a self-sufficient, independent part file.  Since my Gas Control Enclosure has a rather simple interior, I’m using just creating a Box that hugs the inside walls, and then Shelling it to the outside.  But your enclosure solid could have lots more features than that, and incorporate some features/bodies of the sheet metal parts it will replace, so don’t be fooled by the simplicity of my chosen example.

4)   Use INSERT – CURVE – SPLIT LINE to inscribe an area on the inside faces of the box to represent the gaps at the seams, and make them about 10x larger than the real gaps.

5)   In the Flow project, identify all these Split faces as an Environmental Pressure condition, to ambient.

6)   INSERT – FLOW SIMULATION – PERFORATED PLATE – as a handy shortcut, just click once on the Environmental Pressure condition, instead of picking all those faces again.  You will have to create a User Defined perforation feature, in the engineering database, with the Rectangular Slot sizes set to the right width, length, and %open area, (see below, right).

7)   Pre-select the same faces used as the Environmental Pressure condition, and now use INSERT – FLOW SIM – LOCAL INITIAL MESH, and override the Automatic mesh settings – we want to guarantee at least 3 mesh elements across these faces, and the Narrow Channel refinement won’t do it, because these are NOT narrow channels any more.  Since our gap faces are .64” wide, we could shoot for a cell size of .21”, and knowing that our Basic Mesh elements were chosen to be 1”x1”x1”, we need to subdivide 3 times (two times would only give us .5^2 = .25”).  So on the manual mesh tab REFINING CELLS, set the “Refine All Cells” slider to level 3.

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1) Applying Temperatures to a Part in an Assembly

Say you want to apply a Temperature boundary condition to a Part.  For example, imagine that this is an Initial Condition within a time-dependent study.  There are several  things going on in the Temperature dialog box, shown below, that we should be aware of.

First and foremost, the dialog box is expecting, by default, that you will apply the temperature to selected FACES.  In the image below, I’ve clicked on the inside wall of the tank/firewall mount, intending to apply an initial temperature to all the nodes throughout this part.  But the dialog is echoing only the selection of a Face.  Some folks will meticulously rotate the view around until they’ve selected every single face of this part – but no,  you will have still failed to assign an intial condition to the nodes in the interior of the volume.

The second thing to note, is that, upon selection, the default temperature the dialog is suggesting is zero Kelvins.  That’s mighty cold.  You’ll certainly replace that value with a more reasonable initial condition.  But if you did persist in selecting only the outer faces of the part, then all the unselected, interior nodes would take the system default – and again, that is zero Kelvin.  So your time-dependent study will initially spike cold, before it finally starts to warm up, due to the thermal inertial of all those cold, cold inner nodes.

So here is a couple of selection techniques in the CAD, to ensure that you get a volume selection in this dialog.

a) Use the selection filter.  See image below for the sequence of picks – you can temporarily invoke the Selection Filter tear-away window, by right-mouse-clicking in any empty, grey space of the main CAD system’s desktop frame – scan down (alphabetically) thru the menu names to “S” for the Selection Filter, and click on the icon to the left of that name.  In the pop-up dialog that results, the 5^th icon from the left will limit the selection to look only for Solid Bodies.  Now a single click on ANY face of the back firewall, will select the entire part, and initialize temps on every node, inside and out.

(PLEASE Note: Once you have turned any filter like this on, and you’re done using it… Turn it OFF!  The same handy filter becomes very un-handy the instant you move on to another dialog where you want to select faces, edges, or points !)

b) Select the part from the Assembly’s Feature Manager.

Of course, once you are working inside the Temperature boundary-condition dialog, you can’t SEE the Feature Manager, it is covered up.  But there are several good ways to change that.   Any time the Feature Manager is covered up, (but the programmers know you might wish to have it back), there will be a (collapsed) copy of it just inside the upper-left corner of the graphics area, (circled as item #1 in the image below).  Click on the plus sign  to the left of the Assembly symbol, and a full, ‘live’ copy of the Feature Tree will temporarily pop into the graphics area, and then you can select any Part icon to set the temps on the entire solid.

The second way to achieve this is to press and then drag DOWN on the faintly darker-gray doubled lines at the very top of the dialog window, (Shown as boxed item #2 in the image above).  This will turn the single Feature Manager into two scrollable managers, one for the Assembly features, one for the Simulation dialog.  You can get rid of the split-window later by simply dragging the same splitter-bar back up to the top of the frame again.

2) Applying Temperatures to a Body in a (Multi-Body) Part File

For quite some time now, we have been able to create multiple Bodies within a single Part file, and simulate the resulting structure with different material properties, contact conditions, etc. exactly as if we were dealing with an Assembly – but without the need to mind so many files, (or wrestle with under/over constrained mates!)   In such a case, there is an additional method of selecting/identifying an entire solid body to get an assigned temperature, (or heat load, or mesh control, etc.).

Consider the part file pictured below, where we are going going to measure thermally-induced stresses across a conducting strip.  This part is constructed in only three features, but there are 5 resulting bodies.  If you expand the  + (plus sign) to the left of the folder named “Solid Bodies (5)”,  you’ll see there is an icon representing each distinct body, and selecting these icons (from within most of the Simulation dialogs), will result in a Solid boundary condition that affects all interior nodes.

This leads me to an interesting question that has come in on the hotline, three times in the last 6 weeks, so I’m going to spread the wealth and perhaps pre-empt further calls on the same subject.  What if you have a part file with only ONE body in it – and you still want to apply a volumetric boundary condition.  Well, the Selection Filter method we discussed previously for Parts in an assembly, will actually work for a single Body in a part file as well.  But there’s a better way.   Perhaps you’ve noticed that the “Solid Bodies” folder only appears in the Feature Manager if there are two or more bodies present in the file.  That’s only a space-saving default – you can override it.

Personally, I prefer to have the Solid Bodies folder, (and the Surface Bodies folder too!) always showing, and you can have that by going to TOOLS – OPTIONS – SYSTEM OPTIONS, and then click on the heading FEATURE MANAGER.  As you can see below, you can override when many of the optional folder-types will appear in the tree, by selecting Hide, Show, or Automatic, (which means to show, only if there is content of that type, resident in the file).  When you are creating Simulation studies as often as I do, and especially mixed-mesh studies with both Solid and Shell mesh elements, I find that having these folders permanently Show is handy, (more so than any possible savings in real-estate by having them off!).

3) Splitting a Solid into Multiple Bodies

This leads quite naturally to another common request for info regarding Thermal studies.  For most studies of stress & strain, the peaks stresses usually occur on the outer surfaces of a part.  But for thermal simulations, we are very often interesting in tracking the peak temperatures  in the center of a part.  How do we ensure that a mesh node gets created right where we want it, and have that node occur at some selectable CAD geometry so we can set up a Sensor?

The SolidWorks 2-day Advanced Parts class answers this question.  But I find that quite often an analyst will have taken only the SolidWorks Essentials class, enough to get by setting up simple parts and assemblies for many folk – but may not have taken any of the advanced courses that cover the more specialized techniques.  About a quarter of the Advance Parts class deals with multi-body modeling technique.

At the opening to this article, I made reference to the SPLIT LINE command – I’m pretty sure that anybody reading this will already have used that command, to inscribe edge lines into a model’s face, (the better to apply local loads and limit the footprint of boundary conditions).  Well, there is a volumetric analog to this command.  Instead of only splitting one or more faces, the cutting action goes completely through the part, like a wire EDM, resulting in multiple bodies.  The command is not hidden, yet many people just don’t stumble upon it:  INSERT – FEATURES – SPLIT.  It accepts either a sketch, or a plane, or a surface.   Unlike the CUT command, SPLIT does not remove any volume.   Because of the way the Meshing algorithm works, any model vertex that lies on the interface between two bodies in the part are guaranteed to create a mesh node at that location.

Let’s go back and consider again that conductive bridge I had used two illustrations ago.  Say I am generating a wattage in the bridge due to resistive heating  – If we model the heating as volumetric, but convective cooling only occurs on the outside faces, then the hottest point should be in the center of the material.  In the screenshot below, I have created a Surface model that cuts into the metal strip.  Note that it has a vertex point that is at the mid-thickness, and lying on the two planes of symmetry.  A SPLIT command using this surface will sever the strip into 2 bodies.

A Default Contact condition of GLOBAL – BONDED will ensure that this strip meshes and solved as one body, but still, it has to mesh the bodies individually first, before the bonding can be done, and this guarantees that there will be a mesh node at the dead-center.

4) Enforcing Mesh Nodes Without Using a SPLIT

There is another way to ensure you can place mesh nodes right where you want them, that is a little more direct.  The dialog for a local Mesh Refinement allows you to select a special type of construction point, called a Reference Point, (Insert – Reference Geometry – Point).  Whether you place this point on a surface of the model, or in the interior of a solid, the mesh refinement will ensure a mesh node at this location.  The same Reference Point can also be identified as a Sensor location, (see below).

The only trick here is that the input dialogs we need to use, are finicky.   For example, if you were to create a construction sketch, with a sketched point exactly where you wanted it in the middle of the solid – the Mesh Refinement Dialog does not accept Sketched points (or endpoints – after all, both are really 2-D elements).  You need the Reference Point, because it (and all the other ‘Reference’ entities) are independent, 3D features.  So, you might then enter the Reference Point dialog, and try to select the Sketch Point you’d created at first… and that also does not work, because Reference Point also does not allow selection of a 2D sketch point.  Blast.  Perhaps the programmers who wrote this dialog assumed that you would only ever want it for surveying lines, model edges, or faces.

Not to worry, though.  I have a workflow that always serves – First, I will create a construction sketch, containing a line drawn so that it spans the solid thickness.  If we were to place a MIDPOINT on it, that is where we want our mesh node (and Sensor).  But, don’t put the midpoint on while you’re in the 2D sketch.  Instead, close the sketch, and invoke the Reference Point dialog.  Select the sketched line.  Use the bottom-most dialog option, to distribute points evenly along the line.  If you want multiple Sensors thru the thickness, then, Great!  This can do it.  But if you only want 1 mesh node in the center, then set the Number of Points to be ‘1’, and you’ll get a 3-D reference point, right at the mid-point of the line.

5) Selecting Buried Faces

Finally, there are a lot of times when you want to apply a thermal contact condition to two touching bodies, (whether they be parts in an assembly, or multi-bodies in a part), and you just get tired of using the right mouse click – Select Other workflow, over and over again.  Fortunately, there’s a faster way to set up Simulation boundary conditions on contacting face.   This next sequence can’t be done from the middle of a Simulation dialog, though – you have to set this up in advance.

Activate the “Configurations” tab – the one third-from-left at the top of your Feature Manager, (see image below).   Right-Mouse-Click over the name of the current Configuration, and select “New Exploded View”.  The next dialog might take a few moment’s practice, but it will allow you to select, then simply tug components, apart from each other until selection of the opposing faces is be easy.

Once you’ve created this Exploded View, you can return to the Configurations dialog to turn it on or off as needed to make face-selections easy.   Any Simulation boundary conditions that are applied while in the exploded state, will map correctly to the true, assembled position once the study runs.  Even if you hit RUN and solve the problem while the model is shown exploded, the solution will still be correct.

This ability to create exploded views used to be solely available in an Assembly file.  But ever since SolidWorks 2012, you can also create exploded views in a multi-body Part file.  Since SolidWorks 2013, you can also create more than one Exploded View for any particular assembly configuration, which is another great improvement.

These are the tips I end up sharing in the field most of the time, but as I come across others, or get feedback from the New England user base, I’ll update and add to this document.  So check back here every couple of months or so.  And, if you have another selection technique you find particularly handy, that you’d be willing to share, then by all means reply back via our Support address (below).

Keith Pedersen
Principal Applications Engineer
support@capinc.com

Working with CAPINC, Byrd Technology uses SolidWorks software and a Dimension 3D printer, allowing them to offer everything to their customers, from design, to analysis, to photorealistic rendering and rapid prototyping. While other design companies consider design and analysis separate phases of product development, Byrd Technology Group starts analysis at the beginning of the product design cycle. Their integrated approach to the design process eliminates the need for separate analysts and costly redesigns, saving their customers precious time and money. With SolidWorks Simulation, Byrd Technology is able to not only design products, but preform tests to see if the product is going to function as designed.

With Tim’s extensive background in analysis, he explained how SolidWorks Simulation has made testing product designs easier for his customers to understand.

“SolidWorks Simulation is really great for analysis … it’s not just the fact that it does a good job at it, it’s the post processing, it’s how you can create cutaways… and you can actually go in and look at everything above the yield, so say the yield is 36,000 KSI, you can say anything above 36 KSI, light that up, and it’ll actually give you a view of those specific areas rather than just a big color plot that most customers aren’t going to understand anyway. They’re going to say ‘Well, is it good or is it bad?’ That’s the nice thing about SolidWorks Simulation, it gives you tools that allow you to look at areas that are specific to what the customers looking for, the maximum stress or fatigue, that type of thing. That’s a great advantage to using SolidWorks Simulation.”

Tim also appreciates SolidWorks Simulations graphical interface. Instead of showing a fixed 2D image, he now uses Simulation to show how liquids or gases flow through a design with realistic 3D graphics.

“Now our thermal capabilities, we can do real-time animation so that people don’t just see a solid, static image. We can take that image, and we can take a cut away of any system, and just move it back and forth and you can see the air flow patterns, and the temperatures and the pressures, and all that. We can also do real-time animation, so you can see how the air is flowing through and changing color as it moves, for temperature, pressure, or velocity throughout a system. These two packages give us incredible capability to not just design products, but design products that are going to work and prove that they are going to work. We’re not just saying, hey we use great design principals, we do, but we prove it. We prove it with our structural analysis, our FEA, and our CFD.”

Along with design and analysis, Byrd Technology Group provides photorealistic renderings to their customers, which work well for customers who are searching for investors. For these investors to visually see a concept in the proposed designed environment is priceless. Contractor Stephen Byrd works heavily with SolidWorks and PhotoView 360 for the company’s renderings.

“SolidWorks is, generally speaking, extremely easy to use, which is what’s great about it. It’s very intuitive, but on top of that, the rendering capabilities of SolidWorks within the PhotoView program is pretty fantastic.”

Combining the power of PhotoView 360 with other graphic design software is simple for Stephen. He works directly from PhotoView to modo, a designer-friendly 3D software from Luxology that combines modeling, sculpting, painting, animation and rendering in a natural workflow. Modo provides freeform conceptual modeling tools based on the use of Subdivision Surfaces and provides state-of-the-art visualization using the same renderer as used in PhotoView 360. Stephen described how he uses the software with Modo for advanced rendering and visualization.

“One thing that SolidWorks is great with is compatibility with a lot of other stuff, but there’s direct compatibility with Modo so we can bring models with materials and everything right into Modo and everything is still there. Still right exactly how it was and then we can go from there and set up environments, lights, whatever and work a little bit more on the materials to make them more specific. PhotoVeiw gives you that initial ability and then you can kind of take it to the next level so that compatibility is fantastic.”

Even with how great SolidWorks is, it is still 3D virtual modeling. Combining that with their 3D Dimension Printer, Byrd Technology Group believes that it’s a priceless experience for customers to have a prototype to hold in their hands. Stephen explained the company’s initial interest in 3D printing and how the company has benefited from the investment.

“Originally when we got the Stratasys printer, it was more of something we could offer to our clients, as well as a testing capability for us. So we could make the parts in SolidWorks and actually see how they are going to go together, make sure that our design was good, and that everything was going to be seamless.”

Over time, Byrd Technology’s customers have started to see the value in 3D printing their designs during the design process. Stephen spoke about how the popularity of the Stratasys machine has grown, and continues to attract designers.

“There are a lot of people that really, really love having the ability to have their products printed and have a prototype in their hand. So it’s grown pretty quickly, and once people use it, every time they do something they want it printed just because once they see how real it actually is and that it’s so quick and really not that expensive, especially in comparison to injection molding a part, it’s a fraction of the cost, they just see the value there. It’s kind of just like the renders, after people do it once, they keep doing it because they really see that value. But it’s just initially helping the customer understand what that value is to them and how it’s going to help them long term. Initially I think it’s like, ‘I don’t need a prototype, I could just build it’, but to get something for a fraction of the price really quickly that you can test with and use.”

Byrd Technology’s prototyping capabilities and test equipment verify the function and integrity of products early in the design phase, saving their customers time and money. But they don’t just use their 3D printer for prototyping alone. Stephen explained how the Dimension printer enables small part production.

“Another thing about the Dimension printer is that if you’re doing low-volume printing, or low volume parts, sometimes you can just use it. It’s not just a prototype machine. For some of the parts that are really unique, instead of making a mold and paying thousands of dollars a lot of times, they can just print.”

By using tools like SolidWorks and their Dimension 3d printer, the team at Byrd Technology Group keep providing their customers with quality designs and products. Watch the entire interview with the Byrd Technology Group to learn more about the company, their solutions, and how they are using CAPINC solutions.

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The Design Series features printers that offer unparalleled speed as well as multi-material printing; ABSplus strength and fine feature details; a range of different color possibilities; easy-to-remove support materials; and gives you the capability to print multiple materials simultaneously with the widest range of material properties on the market.

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Production, Without the Line
Created for those working in manufacturing at the decision-making level, the Stratasys Production Series helps you rethink the factory from the floor up. Imagine production without the expense and time requirements of tooling. Imagine making changes quickly and affordably.

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Earlier today Stratasys  announced their latest Product Portfolio. Watch their video and check out the Stratasys product lines: The Idea Series, Design Series (Objet Line and Dimension Line), and Production Series.