 Hi everyone, quick video here to show how we can run a basic simulation study in SOLIDWORKS. So if we want to do some some part analysis, this is really useful for us. So I've got this cylinder that we modeled in the in my last SOLIDWORKS video and I want to go ahead and do a simulation on this part. So the first step we need to do is come in here and add in our simulation functionality. So if I click on the SOLIDWORKS add-ons you should have a SOLIDWORKS simulation button here. I've already clicked it because it takes a second sometimes to load this so just to kind of avoid that. But if you click this button it'll look like it hasn't really done anything and maybe just sit there for a minute and then eventually you'll gain these simulation tabs which can help us actually carry out the simulation. So if I click over then to my simulation tab I'm going to click new study because I want to start a new analysis and here you can change the name you can define if it's a static simulation or you know a number of other simulations I'm just going to stick with static and now I would just want to go through and kind of basically walk through applying what I need. One thing that you'll typically do is apply a material so this is just specifying what material your part is and you can select from their you know database of lots of different types of materials you can define your own material. Since I'm only really in this in this example going to be looking at stress it doesn't really matter what my material is stress is independent of material but if I wanted to accurately know you know how much deformation I might expect or any of those other criteria if I wanted to use some of the mass functions to get you know the the mass moment of inertia the the mass of a part that I've modeled then I might need to specifically define my material. If I want to know if it's going to fail and have that show up accurately in my report then I'd want to specify my my material. I'm just going to choose whatever this is defaulted on which is a looks like just a generic alloy steel click apply and close so I've applied my material to my part. Next I'm going to go ahead and choose a fixture so we have to kind of carefully choose how we are going to fix this this part you know what what is it which pieces don't move right so I'm just going to do kind of a basic I guess more or less a beam bending style problem so I'm just going to say I want to fix my geometry and now it gives me some options I'm going to pick fixed and I'm just going to pick if I zoom in here a little oops zoom in here I'm just going to say I want to fix this end so this would be as if it's cemented into a wall great I've fixed that end and I don't really need to define anything else here I'll just go ahead and click okay next I need to put a load on here and again there's a lot of different kinds of loads I just want a basic force and I'm going to apply it to this face of my part and you can kind of see by default with the oops with the arrows here it's pointing into my part so it's a compressive axial load and that you know is fine if that's what I want to do I want to pick something different so I'm going to click over on my options here selected direction and see I don't have my planes on here so I'm going to turn those on and that allows me to specify what plane direction I want to use so you can see here I turned my planes on by clicking this this view menu and then I specified my top plane and again this is I'm just kind of doing it arbitrarily but you would pick it to match your situation and then I picked what direction of these three options of course I could apply more than one and I can pick which direction up or down in this case by clicking the reverse direction checkbox and then I'll go ahead and apply a load to this I don't actually you know know what would make this interesting but let's just do a thousand newtons to see what that might look like so I'm going to apply oops I accidentally scrolled on this I'm going to apply a 1000 newton load to that face you know click okay all right so I've got my fixture I've got my load applied there's actually not much more to do here so next I need to mesh my part so if you're familiar with finite element analysis basically we mesh a part into you know little units and then we apply our our analysis to each of those individual units and just kind of do it over and over again until all the units are solved so I'll click create mesh here it gives me the option to define how how coarse or fine the mesh is it performs exactly as you would expect if I go all the way to the fine direction that means it's going to take a long time to calculate or longer to calculate if I go all the way to the course it'll be faster to calculate and then of course fine is more accurate and course is less accurate so there's some sort of balance there right typically somewhere in the middle will probably work for us if we find that our because our geometry is complicated or our loading is complicated and we're not you know getting expected results we can make that mesh a little finer to get a little bit more accuracy but again realizing that it's a trade-off in computation time so I'll click okay to mesh that it'll take just a second and we can see our mesh you can get a sense of how fine it is by how large those areas are and then I'm going to click run the study and this one's pretty simple so it shouldn't take too long hopefully there it's already done and great we've got some some data that we can look at first I have up the stress plot and of course you can see it's it's showing us the deformation which is you know exaggerated but we have stress on here in pass scales and so we can see this one is saying about 31 mega pass scales and it's von Miesi stress is what it shows us by default which is basically max distortion energy theory applied to stress and in the bottom here it gives our yield strength so that you could compare against this yield strength and of course you know if if we actually were exceeding our yield strength it would put this little arrow up here to kind of show us which colors on our plot exceed our yield strength we didn't we didn't exceed our yield strength so that doesn't you know show us anything at the moment and of course you know we just kind of arbitrarily specified the material so I could also look at my displacement plot which really just shows me how much the displacement is out at this end what's that 0.001 millimeters so not very much at all very small displacement and of course the picture is exaggerated one thing I'm going to I want to show you I'm going to go back to the stress plot and then if I double click on the stress plot I can actually change what type of stress it's showing me so by default it's von Miesi's I can go in here and I can say I want to know the normal stress in a given direction I think it's if I'm seeing my orientation correctly here I think I could look at the y stress normal stress in the y direction is that the direction I'm pointing maybe so that's interesting if I had some shear stress going on that I was curious about I could come in and look at my shear stress sometimes for me at least I have a hard time figuring out exactly what direction we're talking about here so sometimes it's just a matter of picking one and seeing what it shows us and if it makes sense but we can go in here and look at the shear stress and how that's distributed based on direction and so forth so we can change which which stresses of interest von Miesi's is kind of the standard because it's you know as as you know for ductile materials it's it's kind of the one that we use typically if we're trying to compare against our failure theory so that's great we can get these plots one useful thing is we can click this report button and that generates a report for us that we can you know output to like pdf and then you know get whatever information that we we want out of that and kind of use that as a as a handoff thing we'll probably use that in this class I can also you know if I find like a good image something that's really useful I can take a kind of snapshot of that oh and then the one other thing I want to mention under plot tools there's a really useful thing called the probe if I want to know where you know what the stress is at different locations sometimes you know we might have stress concentrations like up here we have kind of some you know concentrated stress near the wall and that might be okay but sometimes if we have sharp angles in geometry that sort of artificially inflates the stress concentration so we might say well we don't want to know what it is right at that wall but rather you know a little bit out and and then again a little bit out here so we can get these little pop-ups which would show us the stress at this specific node in our mesh and it gives us that that bit of information that that might be useful all right so great we can we can kind of analyze and then use these these results to compare with our hand calculations and hopefully that's that's useful for us all right thank you