The New Year is a month old and the SolidWorks nation is
soon to converge on San Diego for SolidWorks World 2012. So before the masses depart, I thought I
would launch my FISHER/UNITECH blog campaign of “12 Tips in 2012.” My goal is to provide a handy tip each month
that addresses questions I’ve been hearing from many of my SolidWorks customers
here at FISHER/UNITECH. Tip number one
addresses a few questions I hear a number of times a year; “How do I
measure the volume of a container and what is the best way to monitor the
volume while making changes?”
Let’s take a closer look at the process. I might recommend using
this small cosmetic bottle.
- Cap the top of the bottle with some type of extrusion, merging the feature to the existing bottle.
- Use what I call the Box-Extrude/Combine-Subtract
method. Extrude a large box around the
entire bottle (add dimensions as you would like and make sure the box is large
enough to accommodate any future changes you might make to the bottle) and make
sure to NOT merge the box extrusion to the bottle (you should have two bodies
now, a box and a capped bottle.)
- Use the Combine command to subtract the bottle
body from the box body (Insert-Features-Combine for those who may not have used
this command before.) When prompted to
choose which bodies to keep, only pick the inner body which is the fluid volume
of the bottle.
- Mass Properties will now display the Volume of
the fluid
- Create a new Design Study in the model
(right-click the Motion Study 1 tab in lower left corner of SolidWorks.)
- Add Variables to the Design Study linking them
to dimensions in the model you would like to adjust.
- Set the variable information as needed (Range,
Range with Step, Discrete Values.)
- Add one or more constraints by adding Sensors in
the model. (For this bottle I added a
Sensor to monitor volume and set the constraint to be between 99mL and 101mL
because I want a 100mL bottle)
- Hit RUN and watch the model adjust the
dimensions through each scenario and based on your sensor the results view will
give you a pass or fail.
- Weed through your results and find the scenarios
that passed. You can pick on the headers
to have the model update to the dimensions from that particular scenario.
- Pick your final dimensions or add more as
variables and run again. You can also
choose to optimize the design which allows the addition of a goal and
SolidWorks will then try and tell you what the best combination of dimensions
is.
For those that still may be a bit confused. Here is a link to a YouTube video I created
of the process. I would love to hear
your comments and suggestions for other tips for my 12 tips in 2012 campaign.
See more SolidWorks Videos on our YouTube channel
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