How to Apply Rotational restraints to a face of a Solid
All the Simulation tutorial examples that enforce a Rotation do it one of two ways:
1) Using the “On Cylindrical Face” restraint
2) Using a Shell Mesh – because the nodes in a Shell have rotational degrees-of-freedom, so you can program in rotations as well as displacements
What is missing in this list? Both of these restraints assume that the entities you select for the rotation, also serve to define the axis of rotation – i.e., about the center of the circular face, or about the edge of a shell. What if you need to rotate a non-cylindrical face about an axis that is AWAY from the face? What you need to know is method 3:
Method 3:
- Create a Solidworks AXIS object that represents the rotational center - INSERT – REFERENCE GEOMETRY – AXIS
- Apply the restraint: FIXTURES - ADVANCED FIXTURES - USE REFERENCE GEOMETRY
- In the Purple-tagged selection box, (tool-tip says “”Edge, Plane, Face, or Axis for direction””), select the Axis you created.
- After you’ve done this, the Directional dialog boxes in the lower part of the menu CHANGE! Instead of saying “Plane Dir 1” , “Plane Dir 2”, and “Normal to Plane”, they will now present a cylindrical coordinate system. By clicking the SECOND of these boxes, (“Circumferential”), you can input a rotation angle in radians.
Simulating body-to-body Contacts
Solidworks Simulation allows you to analyze press-fits, sliding fits, and intermittent contact between bodies. These contact cases are a powerful tool, but are also time-consuming.
If you search the help pages for details about how to apply these contacts, (search on the phrase “Component Contact”), you will see that there are three important flavors of contact condition. These flavors allow you to fine-tune the contact type for best accuracy and performance.
The three contact types are: Node-to-Node, Node-to-Surface, and Surface-to-Surface. These options exist as a radio-button selection under an “Advanced” sub menu.
BUT – in a newly-installed copy of Solidworks, you might not even SEE an “Advanced” sub menu!
You have to first tune your Simulation options to make this option visible.
The command menu sequence to do this is:
SIMULATION – OPTIONS – DEFAULT OPTIONS, under the sub-heading MESH; Check ON the option that says,
“Show advanced options for contact set definitions”
You only have to change this setting once, and it will ‘stick’ from then on.