I am looking forward to the software release date for several of the included enhancements, including what will be in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023.  If you’d prefer to watch, I’ve created a video with this info as well:

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Materials Database – Material Grades

I posed this very question last year, “What would an annual release of SOLIDWORKS Plastics be without changes to the material database?”.  SOLIDWORKS is, of course, updating its material database for 2023. Now, you’ll see many new, commercially available material grades in the polymer database.  Additionally, we’re seeing more than 50 materials in the existing database receive updates with the latest material property values, as supplied by the resin vendors.  SOLIDWORKS is also removing many obsoleted resins from the SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 material database.  For those of you keeping score, the SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 material database includes resins from 196 companies, spanning 138 material families. This also includes more than 4000 commercially available resin material grades for our injection molding analysis.

SOLIDWORKS Plastics Materials Database Manager

One of the first things users will notice with the SOLIDWORKS Plastics Materials Database Manager is a facelift to the user interface.  This is an interesting change that I welcome!  Light colors on a white background can be difficult for some individuals to see. SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 replaces the yellow-on-white in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 (Figure 1) with a medium gray-on-white (Figure 2).

Figure 1. SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 Polymer Database

Figure 2. SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 Polymer Database

The astute reader will notice that several tabs, such as Elastic Modulus and Poisson’s Ratio, have been removed across the top of the interface.  I appreciate the decluttering of tabs where, in most instances, the included material property data was a constant value and not temperature-dependent.  Another subtle change is moving the material polymer family and resin manufacturer name from the title bar and into separate material property fields (Figure 3).

Figure 3. New material property fields

There are a few other Plastics Materials Database Manager changes not currently in the Pre-Release version of SOLIDWORKS 2023. However, they should become available in an early 2023 service pack.  For example, filled materials will include detailed fiber properties in an expandable material property field (Figure 4).

Figure 4. New fiber properties

The database will include both solid density and melt density for many resins in an expandable Density section.  Also, Thermoset resin material properties will include PVT data for the cured and uncured states, Heat of Reaction and Induction Time Constants, and Ejection Conversion and Initial Conversion data from resin manufacturers, when available.  The solver for SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 has also been enhanced to account for these additional material properties to improve the accuracy of Fill, Pack, and Warp simulations.

Summary and Report

In SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023, you can now access the Summary and the Report of the finished analysis separately when right-clicking on the Results folder (Figure 5).  This is a simple – and great – addition to SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023!

Figure 5. Summary and Report changes

Along with this change, when accessing the Summary information, there are tabs with more content for easy access to the pertinent information from a solved SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 analysis (Figure 6).

Figure 6. New Summary information and tabs

More Reporting Options

You’ll also notice changes to how SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 creates reports (Figure 7). SOLIDWORKS removed the Classic and Light report options from prior versions of SOLIDWORKS Plastics. Now, we see an updated report template.  We will also be able to select the type of report – MS-Word, MS-PowerPoint, HTML, or all formats – to generate instead of having all possible report formats created by default.  This will save time if you choose a single report format.

Figure 7. Updated report generation

The changes coming in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 are new and updated materials, a user interface change, and better summary and report options.  On the surface, it seems there are only three updates for 2023.  Digging into the details of each enhancement shows a lot more going on “under the hood” to make these happen.  I hope you’re looking forward to SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2023 and taking advantage of the new features and enhancements.  Now go make your products better with SOLIDWORKS Simulation!

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions in SOLIDWORKS 2023.  Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2023.  All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Bill Reuss
Sr. Application Engineer Specialist, Simulation
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2022 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests

Design Innovation Month is CATI’s “What’s New in 2023” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D Printing & 3D Scanning technology.   This year we’re going back to the future to bring you in-person events, live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!   Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your nearest live event.

If I plan to perform structural analysis on the design, one of the first steps in planning the finite element model is defeaturing the part.  Defeaturing geometry is something most of us are familiar with.  The intent is to simplify geometry by removing any features that I do not believe will be relevant for simulation.  I like to think about this in terms of load bearing or non-load bearing when preparing for structural analysis.  If the feature is small and will not significantly contribute to the structural performance of the design, I remove it from the CAD model before beginning any analysis work.  Shouldn’t we do the same for injection molding analysis?

In this simple example, I will start with a SOLIDWORKS CAD model of the Computer Aided Technology logo.  With this version, I have suppressed two text features from the model.  I then created a SOLIDWORKS Plastics project to perform a Fill analysis on the part using a shell mesh.  In the setup, I specified a polypropylene resin and used default conditions for melt temperature, mold temperature, and injection pressure.  The injection location is a vertex towards one of the ‘corners’ of the logo, the red cone shaped feature seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

The pertinent details of this analysis are solution time, mesh size, and the output quantity “pressure at end of fill”.  On my Dell Precision 7760 mobile workstation, the solve time was 48.6 seconds to perform the fill analysis.  The default sized, curvature-based mesh has approximately 9,700 elements and 4,800 nodes.  The maximum injection pressure for the analysis was 5.12 Megapascal.  The mesh details and injection pressure results are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

What if instead of defeaturing the part of small text features, I left them in the model for a SOLIDWORKS Plastics Fill analysis?  The non-defeatured part is shown in Figure 3.  Yes, the blurring is intentional, or I will give away the answer too soon!

Figure 3.

Using the same setup and boundary conditions for the defeatured CAD model, I first tried to create a curvature-based mesh with the default mesh size.  The small text features will, of course, increase the mesh size but the resolution of the text, in my opinion, is poor (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

To improve the quality of the text on the part, I added mesh control of 0.75mm to the top face of every letter of the text features.  The text features protrude 0.5mm from the main surface of the part – I could have used an even smaller mesh control size for better text resolution!  As you can already see in the upper, right corner of Figure 5, the mesh details are now approximately 23,600 nodes and 11,800 elements.

Figure 5.

SOLIDWORKS Plastics analysis, like any other computer simulation, will take longer to solve if the size of the problem is increased.  How much longer?  For this simple model, the solve time for the fill analysis was 184.6 seconds, a 3.8x increase!  The maximum injection pressure also increased to 10.66 Megapascal (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

The increased solution time makes sense, but a larger problem size does not explain why the injection pressure increased by a factor of 2.1.  To understand why the maximum injection pressure increased requires a peek under the hood, so to speak, of the SOLIDWORKS Plastics solver.  I could just state that the reason is a big mathematical problem, and that would be completely correct.

In my example problem, the SOLIDWORKS Plastics solver will continue to increase the injection pressure until the plastic melt front fills the complete volume, meaning the molten resin has contacted all faces of the part cavity.  The math problem is not complete until 100% of the part surfaces, including all the text, has 100% filled.  In a real-world injection molding process, the text will only partially be filled.  We can see and (most of the time) easily read the molded-in text on a part because the root of the text has well defined edges.  The top surface of the text would look much like a SOLIDWORKS CAD dome feature, if you are familiar with that.  While there will be a slight increase in maximum injection pressure for the real-world injection molding process, it will not be double the value calculated in the text defeatured example.

Back to what I originally posed at the beginning of this blog, should I defeature plastic part designs for injection molding analysis?  In this simple example, injection pressure and solve time were negatively impacted when I solved a Fill analysis on the non-defeatured part.  Personally, I recommend spending a few minutes to create a defeatured configuration of your part file(s) prior to beginning any analysis.  In preparing for a SOLIDWORKS Plastics analysis, defeaturing always includes removing text features from the design.  I want to get answers as quickly and efficiently as possible.  A little bit of CAD preparation prior to analysis goes a long way towards making this happen.  Now go make your products better with SOLIDWORKS Simulation!

Bill Reuss
Product Specialist, Simulation
Computer Aided Technology

“There’s a reason why there’s an eraser on a pencil.” That’s how Dan Saperstein, CATI’s senior vice president of business systems, describes the creative, iterative process of developing a product for the real world using simulation. In the early design stages, simulation allows companies greater leeway to experiment and innovate—to design with a pencil, rather than a pen.

“Companies traditionally brought products to market through physical testing,” says Dan. “They would physically design it, build it, break it, and redesign it until it was no longer broken.” It’s a process that is both time consuming and expensive, and is also limiting in the type of tests that can be performed and the data it is possible to collect from them. With simulation, the story is different. “We’re able to bring our customer’s process to market a lot faster, allowing for better quality and better innovation. Simulation is no longer a nicety in the marketplace—it’s a necessity.”

Joe Formicola, CATI’s vice president of CAE simulation solutions, concurs. “I see simulation becoming even more of an important tool for product development. It’s becoming increasingly available because of its ease of use on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform and the connectedness to CAD, but also because of the computational capabilities that the cloud has allowed us to have.”

If the advantages that simulation brings to an engineering firm are hard to overstate, so too are the benefits that come from working with an experienced sim team.

This was the logic CATI followed in late 2020, when they acquired Caelynx, an Ann Arbor-based team of simulation consultants specializing in the Dassault Systèmes product line of simulation software, which also includes SOLIDWORKS. By bringing on a simulation team with decades of expertise in diverse fields, CATI could better support their own customer base of SOLIDWORKS users by helping them integrate their CAD workflows to a wider range of advanced simulation tools.

However, as Joe is quick to point out, an expert simulation team is an enhancement to a company’s internal team, not a replacement. “We want our customer’s expert engineers to have expert tools. But to create these types of easy-to-use workflows that connect to CAD and are very advanced, you need people with experience who have in-depth understanding of the physics solvers, of the CAD tools, and who are used to working with customers and helping them implement these tools.”

For as impressive as all that sounds, the depth and breadth of CATI’s new simulation team can best be demonstrated by introducing the individual members. If your company needs simulation support, these are the people ready to assist you.

Meet the CATI Sim Team Leaders.

Reading the information for SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, you will find a statement indicating the Direct solver has been optimized, potentially providing a 50% reduction in solution time compared to previous releases.  I decided to set up and solve several benchmark models to put this to the test.  The four SOLIDWORKS CAD files I selected are from the SOLIDWORKS Plastics tutorial files.  The tutorial document is in the following folder on your hard drive: C:\Program Files\<SOLIDWORKS Installation Folder>\SOLIDWORKS Plastics\Document\english.  The tutorial document outlines where the CAD files are located on your hard drive.  For additional reference, I have previously written about SOLIDWORKS Plastics tutorials with SOLIDWORKS 2021.

The first thing you need to know is where to access the Fill/Pack solver settings.  Once you have the SOLIDWORKS Plastics project created for a solid meshed study, edit the Flow-Pack parameters and then click Solver Settings.  Then use the pull-down arrow and change the Volume of Fluid (VOF) Algorithm from the default CICSAM to Direct (Figure 1).  I solved each of the four benchmark models using the Direct solver using SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021.  I then saved the CAD file to a new name, opened and converted the file to SOLIDWORKS 2022, then re-meshed and solved the analysis.  For reference, all solves were done using a mobile workstation with an Intel I9-8950HK 6-core CPU with hyperthreading on, and 32 GB DDR4-2666 RAM.

The first benchmark model I tested was a wrench (Figure 2), shown without and with the SOLIDWORKS Plastics mesh.  When using SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021, the mesh details were 27,848 nodes and 9,839 elements.  After converting the file to SOLIDWORKS 2022, I had to re-mesh the geometry in SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, resulting in a mesh with 27,826 elements and 9,836 nodes.

With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021, the solve time with the Direct solver was 123.0 seconds (about two minutes) for the Fill portion of the analysis and a Total Wall Time solve (Pack analysis) of 189.4 seconds (about three minutes).  When I solved the Wrench plastics study with SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the solve times were 108.4 seconds (about two minutes) and 169.7 seconds (about three minutes) for FILL and PACK, respectively.  This equates to a 11.9% FILL time reduction and 10.4% PACK time reduction for the analysis.

The second benchmark model is the brush (Figure 3).  With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021, the mesh details were 33,354 elements and 11,533 nodes.  With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the mesh details were 33,404 elements and 11,562 nodes.

With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021, the solve times were 144.9 seconds (Fill) and 271.8 seconds (Pack) with the Direct solver.  When solved with SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 and the Direct solver, the times were 123.1 seconds (Fill) and 238.4 seconds (Pack).  This equates to a 15.0% reduction in Fill time and a 12.3% reduction in Pack time.

The third benchmark model is the Mounting Plate (Figure 4). With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021, the mesh details are 181,474 elements and 74,354 nodes.  When re-meshed with SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the mesh details are 181,321 nodes and 74,326 elements.

The solve times with SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021 were 1,276.2 seconds (Fill) and 1,475.9 seconds (Pack).  When solved with SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the times were 1,028.4 seconds (Fill) and 1,214.5 seconds (Pack).  This is 19.4% reduction in Fill solve time and a 17.7% reduction in Pack solve time.

The fourth and last benchmark model is the Trim Piece (Figure 5).  With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021, the mesh details are 183,501 elements and 70,729 nodes.  With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the mesh details are 188,017 elements with 72,393 nodes.

The solve times for SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2021 were 1,092.7 seconds (Fill) and 1380.3 seconds (Pack) compared to 977.3 seconds (Fill) and 1,259.2 seconds (Pack).  The Trim Piece had a 10.6% reduction in Fill time compared to an 8.8% reduction in Pack time.

Now that I have gotten through the benchmark data and compared solve times, I am drawn to the performance claims from the What’s New documentation for SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022.  None of my four benchmark models approached the approximately a 50% performance improvement.  The solver improvements averaged 14.2% for Fill analysis and 12.3% for Pack analysis.  To be completely fair, while each model was solving, I was still using my workstation for office tasks, such as Outlook and Teams, but no other high-CPU demand processes.  Had I allowed my workstation to only solve the SOLIDWORKS Plastics projects with no other programs running, my benchmark data might have shown more improvement.

The interesting data point was with the Mounting Plate benchmark, with the second largest mesh size tested.  The Mounting Plate showed the most significant improvement between the Direct solver of 2021 compared to 2022.  I think an interesting follow-up benchmark would be to use significantly larger SOLIDWORKS Plastics models rather than what I solved.  Stay tuned?

Thank you for taking the time to read through the benchmark data and all the numbers.  I hope you take some additional time and perform some of your own benchmarks comparing older versions of SOLIDWORKS Plastics to the current SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 solvers.  I would like to know what your experience is with the improved Direct solver.  Now go make your products better with SOLIDWORKS Simulation!

Bill Reuss
Product Specialist, Simulation
Father, Golf Junkie, Coffee Connoisseur, Computer Nerd
Computer Aided Technology

Cool Analysis

In an analysis where the Cooling stage is most of the solutions computation 2022, SOLIDWORKS Plastics reduces the overall solution time by a minimum of 20%. Yes, a minimum of 20% your time could be even faster. Below is a comparison of three models with a varying number of elements.

Fill & Pack Analysis

The new Fill analysis Direct solver is no slouch. It boasts a reduction in Fill time of 50% compared to previous years. Couple the solve time reduction and the more accurate calculation of inertial effects on thick parts with a hexahedral mesh and the Direct solver is a real winner this year. Below is a comparison of two Fill and Pack analysis on two parts varying in element count.

SOLIDWORKS Plastics speeds up your plastic injection part designs while decreasing your time to a solution. Check out all the What’s New CATI blogs in SOLIDWORKS Plastics.

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2022. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2022. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Robert Warren
Simulation Specialist
Computer Aided Technology

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2021 – Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests
Design Innovation Month is CATI’s massive “What’s New in 2022” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D printing & 3D scanning technology.  That’s six weeks of live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your next event. 

I first wrote about SOLIDWORKS Plastics material changes in the blog SOLIDWORKS Plastics SP3 Additions and Improvements over two years ago.  One of the main additions at that time was improvements to material properties, specifically temperature dependent material properties for specific heat and thermal conductivity.  For SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, the material database improvements are more materials and better data to improve the quality of our analysis work.  If you read the What’s New documentation, there have been 112 materials added and 76 materials removed from the SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 database.  Another change for the material database is that over 1100 resins received updates to PVT (Pressure-Volume-Temperature) material data.  That change may be more significant than added materials.

If you are not familiar with adding a material in SOLIDWORKS Plastics, you can find it by looking at the Injection Unit Settings Property Manager once you have created a new SOLIDWORKS Plastics project.  Right-click on the injection unit, then select Settings, followed by a left-click on the material button to open the material database.  As you scroll through the different material families and trade names, click on the PVT tab to verify if the material has a constant density or temperature dependent density data.  If a resin has constant density, the chart on the PVT tab will look like Figure 1.

Figure 1.

While a SOLIDWORKS Plastics project will solve the FILL analysis correctly, the results from a PACK or WARP solve will not be correct.  The most likely scenario for results for a constant density material would first appear in the estimate of sink marks when reviewing the results from a FILL analysis.  In Figure 2, the constant density material exhibits zero sink everywhere on the filled plastic part.  For all practical purposes with plastic injection molding that is impossible.

Figure 2.

If you are using a version of SOLIDWORKS Plastics from several years ago, constant density materials could be found with a bit of manual searching, clicking through several resin families and material grades.  With SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022, finding a constant density material is no longer the norm.  What you will find with most of the resins in the database can be seen in Figure 3, a temperature dependent density chart for PVT data.

Figure 3.

Having the correct Pressure-Volume-Temperature data of a plastic resin allows the sink mark estimate for a FILL analysis to generate results that indicate regions where sink may be a concern (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

I think we can expect to see the SOLIDWORKS Plastics material database continue to evolve with each new software release.  When the updates improve the accuracy of our analysis results, that is even better!  I hope you are looking forward to utilizing the new resins and new material data with SOLIDWORKS Plastics as much as I am.  Now go make your products better with SOLIDWORKS Simulation!

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2022.  Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2022.  All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Bill Reuss
Senior Simulation Product Specialist
Computer Aided Technology

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2021 – Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests
Design Innovation Month is CATI’s massive “What’s New in 2022” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D printing & 3D scanning technology.  That’s six weeks of live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your next event. 

I have a Dell S2817Q (3840 x 2160 or 4k) monitor, and an HP Omen 27 (2560 x 1440 or 2k) monitor. These are driven by an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 graphics card. To show the difference between the two versions, I took screenshots that have the same pixel dimensions and put them side by side at each resolution.

Below you can see the comparison between the SOLIDWORKS Plastics interface in 2021 and 2022. The first pair of screenshots is on a 2k monitor, the second pair is from a 4k monitor. These monitors do not have many more pixels than a simple Full HD (1920 x 1080) monitor, but you can notice a small difference between the size of the text on the left vs the right.

The difference becomes much clearer when viewing SOLIDWORKS Plastics at 4k. The figure below shows the difference quite clearly.

As you can see, the scaling of the text and the icons in the SOLIDWORKS Plastics feature tree is now correctly adjusted in the SOLIDWORKS Plastics 2022 release. This proper scaling has been extended into property managers and dialog boxes within SOLIDWORKS Plastics as well.

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2022. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the added items in SOLIDWORKS 2022. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Matt Sherak
Sr Simulation Product Specialist, Elite Application Engineer
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2021 – Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests
Design Innovation Month is CATI’s massive “What’s New in 2022” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D printing & 3D scanning technology.  That’s six weeks of live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your next event. 

Change 1: Improved Tree Interface Changes

The first major change to the Plastics Manager tree is improving the tree interface usability. Within the Plastics Manager it will display the active simulation type, so users know directly what type of study is active in the tree.

Change 2: Improved Mesh Interface Changes

The second major change allows you to run a simulation without creating a mesh if you have defined an injection unit and location. SOLIDWORKS Plastics will automatically create the mesh during the ‘run’ execution process. This new feature is like the automatic run feature in the SOLIDWORKS Simulation modules, which also allows for running a study without explicitly creating a mesh.

The other great feature change to the mesh interface, is that you can now easily delete and edit meshes, by simply right clicking on the mesh in the tree and hitting delete. This is also a similar feature within the SOLIDWORKS Simulation modules, and this new addition makes SOLIDWORKS Plastics usability very similar to SOLIDWORKS Simulation studies.

Change 3: Improved Navigational Features

The last major change is that the navigational features across the entire plastic tree have been greatly improved to make accessing results quicker and easier. The right mouse button click option has been implemented across the tree to allow users to access commands previously unavailable via right mouse button click. A user can now run a study by right clicking at the top of the tree and selecting run. Additionally, post-processing features such as; Summary and Report, Clipping Plane Settings, Isosurface Manager, Path Line, Export, and Remove All results, are all accessible via a right mouse button click to results. All of these navigational changes make the SOLIDWORKS Plastics Tree usability directly similar to the SOLIDWORKS Simulation Tree.

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2022. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2022. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Drew Buchanan
Sr. Application Engineer Specialist, Simulation
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2021 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests
Design Innovation Month is CATI’s massive “What’s New in 2022” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D printing & 3D scanning technology.  That’s six weeks of in-person events, live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your nearest live event. 

The property manager looks like this when opened:

You can adjust the number of injection locations (up to a maximum of 4) and the mold open direction. The software will automatically detect a plane for the mold open direction (in this case the top plane). This can be overridden with a user defined plane. If the “Excluded regions” button is checked, you are prompted to select faces of the geometry that will be excluded as possible injection locations. Result Preview will show the injection locations and a fill time plot.

Let’s demonstrate how these various options work by examining the ‘Result Preview’ fill time plot for a simple model. The injection locations are shown as pink cones in the model, but I have made them more prominent by including large red arrows pointing to their location:

1 Injection Location, No Excluded Regions

2 injection locations, no excluded regions

3 injection locations, no excluded regions

4 injection locations, no excluded regions

2 injection locations with the rib faces excluded

Lastly, it’s worth noting that after running the Injection Location Advisor you will see a 3DSketch appear in your CAD Feature Manager Design tree. The 3DSketch contains the point entities for the injection locations.

3DSketch

I hope this part of the What’s New series gives you a better understanding of the new features and functions of SOLIDWORKS 2022. Please check back to the CATI Blog as the CATI Application Engineers will continue to break down many of the new items in SOLIDWORKS 2022. All these articles will be stored in the category of “SOLIDWORKS What’s New.”

Alon Finkelstein
Simulation Product Specialist
Computer Aided Technology

What is Design Innovation Month?

DESIGN INNOVATION MONTH 2021 – Live Events, Webinars, Virtual Showroom, Contests
Design Innovation Month is CATI’s massive “What’s New in 2022” event for SOLIDWORKS, 3DEXPERIENCE, and 3D printing & 3D scanning technology.  That’s six weeks of in-person events, live and on-demand webinars, demonstrations, in-depth blog posts, and prizes!  Best of all, it’s free of charge!  Check the DI Month Hub for all the details and to sign up for your nearest live event. 

For most simulations, assigning a plastic resin to the model is a simple matter of searching the database, choosing your material, and applying it to your injection molded part.

However, on occasion, you may find that the material you wish to use is not one of the materials available in the default database. The process of creating a “User-defined” (custom) material in SOLIDWORKS Plastics is outlined in Solution S-070933 in the SOLIDWORKS Knowledge Base and will be described in this blog.

To properly characterize the temperature dependent material properties of a plastic, information is required about the resin’s viscosity, PVT properties, specific heat, thermal conductivity, elastic modulus, Poisson’s ratio, and numerous other properties. The easiest way to enter this information is to populate a template, provided in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. The easiest way to fill out the template is to simply export out the material properties of an existing material (in Excel format), fill in new values for your particular resin and then import this information into SOLIDWORKS Plastics as a new “User-defined” material.

Start by selecting the “User-defined database” option in the top left of the polymer database window. Pick any existing material in the User-defined database and then select the “Export>Selected Product>xlsx” option in the top center of the window. Save the .xlsx file to a folder of your choice.

Copy the .xlsx file and rename the copied file something like “SW2021 Plastics Material Template.xlsx.” Open this file in Excel.

Delete all the values (colored in blue) in columns B, E, H, K and N. There are over 100 rows in the spreadsheet, so make sure you scroll to the bottom and delete values in the last few rows as well. Note that there are some zeros in column H that cannot be deleted. Do not worry, those cells are protected, so you cannot delete them accidentally.

Save this file again with blank values. This is now a blank template that can be used for future custom materials.

Copy the .xlsx file again and give the new file a logical name that describes your custom material.

Now fill in new values for the various properties of your custom material in columns B, E, H, K and N. Consult with your material supplier to obtain this data or have them fill it out. Note that the data must be entered in CGS (centimeter, gram, second) units. If your data is in SI or English units, you must convert to CGS units first before entering it into the spreadsheet, otherwise you will generate incorrect properties when you import into SOLIDWORKS Plastics. Save and close your spreadsheet when all the data has been entered.

In SOLIDWORKS Plastics, select (or create) the family that your custom material belongs to and then choose “Import>File” from the polymer database window.

Browse to the file on your computer and select “Open.” This will import all the relevant data into SOLIDWORKS Plastics in the correct format that the software needs to process the information.

Lastly, choose your new material, apply it to your injected molded part and proceed with the rest of the setup and analysis. With the power of SOLIDWORKS Plastics beneath your fingertips, your injection molded part is sure to innovate and transform your industry.

Alon Finkelstein
Simulation Product Specialist
Computer Aided Technology, Inc.