A basic example: Building and running - SOLIDWORKS Tutorial

- [Instructor] During this video, you'll learn how to set up and run a normal modes analysis, So let's open up the first SolidWorks file. Go to File, Open. If you're working with a SolidWorks version prior to version 2018 or you don't have the SolidWorks file available, then choose All Files in the dropdown to enable you to see all the file types. Then you can choose the file, beam_start.x_t which is a Parasolid file. Now this won't have any compatibility issues with earlier versions of SolidWorks. If you've got version 2018 or later, you can open up the SolidWorks file directly, beam_start, SolidWorks File. Now click on the Simulation tab, and under the New Study icon, select New Study. Now in the General Simulation option, click that, and we want to use Frequency. This is SolidWorks description of a normal modes analysis. The name will default to Frequency-1. We want to change this name to beam normal modes analysis. Click the Checkmark. Now in the Study Tree, choose the beam_start part, and Apply Edit Material. You're going to choose the Alloy Steel which should be default. Click Apply, and then click Close. Now in SolidWorks version 2018, we can right-mouse click on the Study icon here, and choose Mass Properties. Now we go to the table of the mass properties associated with each part. We've only got one part here, but if there're multiple parts, we'd see the contribution of each part. There's a summary here, just over 120 pounds, then we have all of the required inertia properties in here. Interesting thing we can do is to show the center of the mass. That appears on the model here. If we want to, we can copy this stage to the clipboard or we can print it off. Let's choose the Isometric view so we can orientate the model. Now we're going to constrain the right-hand end as we look at the model in this view. So let's right-mouse click on Fixtures. We're going to used Fixed Geometry, going to apply it to the endface here. It's a rather slender face, so be careful you pick the face in here, not the edges by mistake. Let's call that okay. So click OK. Let's go back to our Isometric view. Now we can right-mouse click on Mesh and say Create Mesh. We run with the default settings for the moment. Click OK. That looks like a reasonable mesh for a normal modes analysis. To control the normal modes analysis settings to some extent, right-mouse click on the Normal Modes Analysis icon. Go to Properties. Here's some properties of the analysis we can control. What I want to do is to increase the number of modes we're going to calculate up to a value of six from the default. From the Main Menu icon, we can just click Run This Study, and a set of six results are produced. This is the set of the first six natural frequencies that we asked for. Now the results are labeled Amplitude1 through Amplitude6 referring to the fact that we're plotting the stress amplitude over here. You can see the label again, Mode Shape-1 through Mode Shape-6. We're looking at Mode Shape-1 at the moment. Let's double-click and then we can just walk through the others. That's Mode-2, Mode-3, Mode-4, Mode-5, and Mode-6. So the highest mode is 343 hertz, we can see in the descriptor window here. We double-click on the first mode. We can see that's at 49 hertz. Now some of the shapes are very contorted, it's quite difficult to tell what's going on, so we will address that shortly how we can improve the visualization, but for the moment, we can get a better range of the frequency values we're looking at by going to the Results icon, right-mouse clicking and saying List Resonant Frequencies. The table here is showing the mode number, one through six. It's showing the frequency, and what we want is the center column, the frequency in hertz. And of course we'll be using hertz as our frequency quantity. The alternative would be to use radians per second. We can save this off as a Comma Separated Variable file, and we just close that out. Now a few things we need to tidy up to improve our visualization, one thing we can do is just hide the constraints. It may be that in your settings, we see the Max and Min labels appearing on the plots, and if that's the case, then we can go to Chart Options. If these are highlighted, then just deselect them. They're pretty meaningless in the normal modes analysis, so they'll just get in the way. So just tidy that up there. This stage, we're just going to save off the file. So we'll say File, Save As, and we'll call this beam_end, the final stage of the model. Check Save. There's a question asking, "Do we want to copy the results files?" We need to answer yes to this, and that copies a supplementary file, a CWR file, which contains the results. So in this video, we've seen how to set up and run a normal modes analysis, and in the next video, we'll look at how to improve the visualization of the results.