Top 10 SOLIDWORKS Webinars in 2020

The end of the year is near! As we wrap up 2020, we are rounding up our top 10 SOLIDWORKS webinars presented by our team of Application Engineers.

#1. SIMULIAWorks - ABAQUS for SOLIDWORKS Users

In this webinar, we explore the power of SIMULIAworks, the structural analysis solution powered by ABAQUS technology. SIMULIAworks allows SOLIDWORKS users to expand their existing Simulation capabilities with a more advanced scalable solution. Explore the user interface and capabilities as well as technology highlights to help benefit your product development workflow for structural analyses. Finally, we’ll take a look at SIMULIAworks with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and how to collaborate better with your users. 

#2. Large Assembly Best Practices

A large assembly in SOLIDWORKS isn't necessarily defined by its size or number of parts; it’s usually just a file that is having performance issues. These issues are normally caused by the complexity of the geometry, machine hardware, and the number of components. Go behind the scenes of your large assembly and learn best practices, hardware recommendations, and more.

#3. SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation - Tank Sloshing and Baffle Design

Consider a partially filled tanker traveling along and then suddenly coming to a stop. The liquid inside its tank will continue to move forward, slamming into the walls, sloshing back and forth in waves.  How much force did that just apply on the tank? Will it cause a dangerous pitching moment? How long will the waves last? Could a particular baffle design within the tank reduce the overall force, turbulence, and time to settle? We used SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation to find out. 

#4. Design for Manufacturing

This webinar explains four areas of Design for Manufacturing: Minimize - Minimize the number of parts it takes to make your product and reduce the number of fasteners that go into your assembly. Reuse -  If you’re going to take the time to design a part, try to make it reusable in other designs.  This can be done by taking advantage of the design library feature in the task manager. Design Intent - You want to have intent to make parts with symmetry and parts that align with other parts. Top Down Design - Parts locating parts and taking advantage of the design style can simplify assembly instruction and the assembly process.

#5. Creating F A I R’s and Ballooned Drawing in SOLIDWORKS Inspection

Creating ballooned drawings and inspection report forms can be an arduous and error prone task. In this webinar, we’ll show you how SOLIDWORKS Inspection can help you automatically create ballooned drawings and First Article Inspection Report Forms (aka F.A.I.R.’s) from native CAD or PDF files. You can also use SOLIDWORKS Inspection as a data logger/import CMM results that will track your measurements with color-coded results. This can be helpful for manufacturing to reject units before it reaches the quality group, thus minimizing the amount of Non-Conforming Material Report (NCMR) forms needed to be filled out. This will ensure your products are released faster rather than waiting on them to be released until the NCMR is completed.

#6. Getting Sketchy with it (Sketch Tips & Tricks)

It all starts with a sketch! But is it a good one? Poor or inefficient sketches can result in errors and hours of troubleshooting. This webinar features four presenters with a combined 50+ years of experience demoing their favorite SOLIDWORKS sketch tools. 

#7. File Management

“Unable to find file” is an unwanted dialog box that pops up from time to time when trying to open an assembly or drawing in SOLIDWORKS. Common scenarios that cause this pesky popup is that you’re not using PDM (however, if you are using SOLIDWORKS Professional or Premium then PDM Standard is available which will take care of a lot of these problems), generic/duplicate file names which cause external references, using network drives, and you’ve selected the “Dhow Show Again” checkbox. This webinar covers the obscure search routines SOLIDWORKS runs every time you open files, how it uses memory and how we can unexpectedly save the wrong files when working with large assemblies. Learn how to redirect individual files, folders and different options for mass fixes and what causes broken file references and network/cloud work environments you'll want to avoid.

#8 Drawing Tips & Tricks

2D Drawings are STILL the 'old standby' go-to deliverable for most design communication. 2D Drawings can be tedious and time consuming, and contain a lot of duplication of effort if you aren't careful. In this webinar, Darin shares a ton of features every SOLIDWORKS user should be aware of.

#9. Surfacing for SolidModeling

In this webinar, we introduce some basic concepts of surfacing and how to achieve more of what we consider hybrid modeling. We’ll explain how to use surface tools to augment your current toolbox of solid features that you’re already comfortable with in SOLIDWORKS. Surfacing allows you to start with simple shapes and constructing something that is very complicated or would be difficult to make using solid geometry. We explain some theory behind these tools along with providing practical examples of how to use these features to easily obtain more complex geometry. Some of the functionalities demonstrated are how to create surface bodies from solid bodies, how to repair imported geometry and how to augment solid features with surface bodies.

#10. Thermal from Beginning to End

In this webinar, part of a series of three, we discuss heat transfer modes and how they relate to Thermal and Flow Simulations. Some background on thermal resistance is covered to help understand how a hand calculation might be compared to Thermal and Flow studies.  Then we walk through a demonstration using SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation and Thermal Analysis.

That’s a wrap! We hope you enjoyed this roundup of our top 10 SOLIDWORKS webinars in 2020. To see what’s in store for 2021 check out our webinar schedule.