converting to sheet metal in solidworks with no fixed face

This is a great improvement, as traditionally defining individual contact sets can have a large impact on the time taken to set up an analysis. There have been improvements around the automatic detection of shell face/edge bonded contacts when set both globally or locally. Sheetmetal parts will automatically extract the mid-plane surfaces, material thickness, and will automatically pickup basic contacts where (due to mid-plane surfaces) the shell elements do not touch (see simple example below).įor 2012, SolidWorks has focused on improving the algorithms for bonding shell elements. The main disadvantages of using this method are that the shell element thickness will have to be manually specified (not linked to model geometry) and in the analysis, the solid body associated with that part will need to be suppressed or deleted.

The mid-plane surfaces tool can automatically find faces to extract the mid-plane from. Manually creating mid-plane surfaces is useful for parts that cannot be converted to sheetmetal (such as tubes). This is a very useful way to create sheet metal parts as it will automatically work out the sheet thickness (the “convert to sheet metal” command will not automatically assign the thickness) and will still work even if your part has no bends in it. Solid parts such as flat plates can be easily converted to sheet metal using the “Insert Bends” command (see below).

When wanting to analyse a part using shell elements, modelling as sheetmetal is a very useful starting point. Thankfully, in the recent versions of SolidWorks there have been some useful improvements to the tools used to setup your analyses with shell elements. However on a complex model you can often use up a lot of the time that you saved in trying to manually set up your analysis.

If you have spent much time performing shell analyses, you will know that they are great for cutting back simulation run time.

Converting to sheet metal in solidworks with no fixed face