Breaking a World Record with SolidWorks!

There seems to be a few sporting events going on this summer, one in London seems to be a bit of a big deal and it got me thinking.  Could I use SolidWorks to discover something about the track and field events?

Modelling a running person was discounted so I thought I'd examine one of the Field events and decided that the shot putt would be a good choice.  So what was the question?  I wanted to know what force was required to match the current world record.  After modelling up the 'Field' and the Shot I then had to come up with a way of modelling the athlete.  After a couple of minutes/hours thought I decided on a simple cannon.  I would push the shot along the cannon at a fixed force.  The launch track would be 2m.  I felt that this would give a reasonable distance to accelerate and also that it would tie in with the actual distance the athlete moves the shot from start to finish.  I only tested for a linear launch and that was what I had used in my school days.  The rotation seemed a bit tricky.

So here was my setup:

Using SolidWorks Event Based Motion I created a simple study that would apply a force to the launcher to push the shot into the air.  The simulation would then stop as soon as it hit the ground and triggered a proximity sensor.

I did not want to just use a random angle or force, I wanted to find out what the most efficient angle and force was to reach the World Record Distance.  I decided to test these individually.  So first to test the angle of launch, I created a Design Study.  Design studies have been in SolidWorks for some time allowing the engineer to test a number of parameters against a system, but this was not something that could previously be carried out for Motion Simulation.  This was something new for SolidWorks 2012 and I was keen to see what it would give me.  I ran the test looking at angles from 30° to 45°.  The optimal angle from this was 35.76°

So now I wanted to know the minimum force required to reach 21.97m the World Record.  This time I set up another study just looking at the launch force.  So what was the force required to launch a shot weighing 7.26kg (16lb) a distance of 21.97m (72 ft)?

413N (93 lbf).  These guys are effectively lifting 42 kg with one hand!  No wonder these guys are all built like a brick outhouse.  That amount of power is incredible.

Once again I was able to use SolidWorks Motion Simulation and Simulation Professional to answer an Olympian question.  What next?

Simulating The Repair Of Sports Injuries

We're all used to hearing about footballers and other professional athletes damaging their cruciate ligament or suffering some other tendon injury.  I remember being told once that they can repair this by cutting away more of the damaged tendon and it seemed like a crazy statement.  How can removing material make something stronger?

Time to do a little bit of medical Simulation!

I fired up SolidWorks and modelled a simple strip with two small tears on each side.  Keeping things symmetrical helped with the setup.  

Close up of the tear



A quick simulation was set up

And here's the results

Maximum stress here was just over 1GPa, almost double the yield limit of the material.

Clearly we are failing here so now for the repair!

All I did here was increase the angle of the cut from 10 to 170 degrees.  This removes 13% of the original bar.

So what did this do to the stress?  Let's take a look:

Wow!  The maximum stress has fallen by 800MPa, a 79% drop in peak stresses.  We can live to run another day!

But why does this happen?  How can removing material increase the strength of the part?

It's all to do with how the stress can spread through the part.  With the narrow/sharp tear the stresses can only act at the root because there are no stresses at the top of the tear openings, but by smoothing out the damage, stress can spread across the entire width of the part allowing more material to take up the strain.

Once again I was able to use SolidWorks Simulation to illustrate what seems to be a paradox, and get the truth.

From the deepest depths to the highest heights.

James Cameron is in the news this morning, not for another box office smash, this time he has hit rock bottom...of the Mariana Trench!  He is the third person to venture to the bottom of the trench following the historic dive by US Navy Lt Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard more than 50 years ago.

James Cameron on his return (courtesy of National Geographic)

SolidWorks posted a study last year on the design of submersible vehicles within SolidWorks and Simulation.  You can read about it and see the video here.


From the deepest depths of the ocean, to the outer limits of the atmosphere where Felix Baumgartner is working on the worlds highest skydiving altitude record.  This is another feat of exploration that hasn't been attempted in more than half a century.  The SolidWorks Simulation team have also done a study to see what forces Felix will be exposed to and if he will reach supersonic speeds during his attempt.  Check it out here.

So, the next time you are planning some extreme record breaking attempt, see if SolidWorks can help.

Solar Ships And SolidWorks

One of our recent blogs featured an article on how SolidWorks was being used to recreate a famous battleship.  Following on this topic, we thought you'd enjoy reading about solar powered boat design using SolidWorks Flow Simulation to increase speed and stability by analysing how the craft cuts through the water.

Read more about the project here

SolidWorks Simulation - Structural Loads

As we baton down the hatches here in Scotland preparing for 90mph winds, I thought it would be interesting to see how tools contained within SolidWorks Simulation assist engineers in predicting structural failures due to severe weather conditions.  Most of us have seen the Tacoma Narrows footage of "gallopin gertie" rolling and swaying before collapsing during a storm in 1940:

This event caused engineers to think about other factors that may affect the building of bridges including vibration and harmonics.  Now if you're in the business of bridge design or other structures that are load bearing, you might want to have a look at the capabilities of SolidWorks Simulation Premium here

Here are some examples of the data you can collect:

SolidWorks Premium - Simulation

SolidWorks has a fantastic range of tools that allows us to design a vast array of products.  A key question in the design process is will the product work?

Is it strong enough?

With SolidWorks Simulation embedded within SolidWorks Premium, these questions can be answered quickly allowing the design to progress along the right path. 

How often is a product designed, with many man hours expended only for it to fail when it's sent to be analysed?

It takes time to export the files out so that other tools can test and
then this needs to be repeated each time a new test is required.

SolidWorks Simulation is built-in. 

It's just an extra tab on a toolbar.  Here is an example:

I am part of a design team working on a bench
mounted mitre saw and have designed a new
Yoke component.  Is my design any good?  Can
it withstand the forces it will experience during
operational use?

To get the answer we set up a
quick study.  The values I used
were from a previous test:

We removed any parts that were already tested to
ensure that the results were calculated even quicker.  The study looked like the image below:

Running the analysis only took a minute, but the great thing about SolidWorks Simulation is that it does not tie up SolidWorks during the calculation.  We can still use SolidWorks to progress other areas of the design or other projects.

Once the analysis is complete we can generate vast amounts of data to interrogate the result.  Here we see a Factor of Safety plot looking at the performance of the part measured against the yield strength of the material used. 

In this test the minimum is over 7 (The load could be increased sevenfold and the part would still not fail) so we should reduce weight in the part.  A quick model update and we can run the test again:

The minimum is now just over 2.5.  This is an acceptable value for this project so we can now finish the design sure that this part will withstand the operational loading.

This is just a small example of how SolidWorks Simulation can help the engineers and designers to ensure that they are not only designing better looking products, but also ensure that they are fit for purpose.  It all happens within the same familiar design environment and there is minimal additional skills required to get some truly useful and detailed results.

To see a video of Simulation in action, click here

SolidWorks Success Story - Henry Technologies

 

DS SolidWorks Helps UK-based Manufacturer

Use Advanced ‘Green’ Design

To Maintain A Technical Advantage

CAD And Fluid Dynamic Software Enables

Henry Technologies To Keep Costs Low

While Producing Environmentally Friendly Products 

The company uses SolidWorks 3D CAD software to design refrigeration safety valves that meet stringent European Union (EU) standards for refrigerant loss. Also SolidWorks^® Flow Simulation software enables the company’s staff to perfect designs before they go to production, anticipating failures or problem areas when fixing them still costs virtually nothing. Henry Technologies developed a new line of pressure relief valves to outperform inferior products that don’t meet the same level of EU regulations.

“European standards restrict the amount that the pressure in a refrigeration system can drop – the amount of refrigerant it can lose – and if we can design to that spec we have a competitive advantage over products that are lower cost but technically inferior,” said Henry Technologies Design Engineer Jordan Gronkowski. “It’s good for the environment and it can also save customers a lot of money because some European countries tax refrigerant heavily and they need to minimize loss.”

“We invested in Flow Simulation as a testing tool. Prototyping is quite expensive only to find out that something doesn’t work,” Gronkowski said. “We use the software to simulate different levels of pressure depending on how widely the valve is open. We test the compression of the spring and the way the components interact, as well as the strength of the parts under pressure. We can test through the software very quickly and efficiently, much more so than with physical prototypes. To produce a physical prototype means having a machine down for anywhere from two to four days to program the new components. With corrections and iterations, that can easily stretch into a week. On the computer, we can do the same testing in a few hours.”

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