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New SolidWorks Office Premium delivers the complete design engineering solution

COSMOSWorks Designer allows you to simulate various assembly connections including bolts, pins, and contacts.

For the designer who wants it all, SolidWorks is introducing SolidWorks® Office Premium, a new top-of-the-line design engineering solution that provides all of the capabilities included in SolidWorks Office Professional, plus the powerful tools offered by COSMOSWorks® Designer design validation and SolidWorks Routing add-on modules.

The SolidWorks Office Premium solution is the most comprehensive, yet cost-effective 3D product design solution available. The package is a third less than the cost of the modules purchased separately, and it has the advantage of a single license for quick and easy installation. Here’s a rundown on the features you'll find in COSMOSWorks Designer and SolidWorks Routing and examples of how two users are putting the new package to work.

Fast checks on parts and assemblies
Upfront design validation allows designers to make better quality products without the delay and cost of physical prototypes. Part of the COSMOSWorks suite of design validation software, COSMOSWorks Designer works inside SolidWorks. The add-on performs upfront stress, displacement, and contact analysis on both SolidWorks parts (including thin and sheet metal parts) and assemblies. In contrast, COSMOSXpress™, the analysis wizard that comes standard in SolidWorks software, works only on parts.

Key to COSMOSWorks Designer is its ability to analyze how parts in an assembly, such as gears in a gearbox, deform under operating forces like a gearbox in motion. Once the analysis is complete, the program outputs the results in 3D contour plots for easy visualization. And to share the results with others, you can output reports in a variety of formats, including HTML, JPEG, BMP, and eDrawings™.

3D routing and electrical harness design

With SolidWorks Routing, you can include tube, pipe, and cable routes in your designs to facilitate a more complete design and to improve BOM completeness. Image courtesy of Wes Mosier at Applied Engineering Services, Inc.

Traditionally, electrical wiring is the last thing you add to a product design and it is usually done at the preproduction stage. This often leads to last-minute quality problems and delays in production.

Now you can design electrical wiring and harnessing into your 3D model early in the design process using SolidWorks Routing. This add-on enables you to create routes for electrical wires, cables, and harnesses (as well as tubes and pipes) in your SolidWorks model.

Electrical design data can be imported to help detail the routes. An Auto-Route function lets you create cabling paths by clicking on a start and an end point. These paths can also be routed through mounting clips and hangers to secure the wiring in place. When your design is complete, the harness detailing tool flattens the 3D electrical route to create detailed harness board drawings and documentation for manufacturing. This documentation includes a bill of materials, circuit summary report, and connector wiring detail summaries.

Putting the software to work
COSMOSWorks Designer runs FEA analysis on even complex geometry to optimize part design. Hi-Tech Welding and Forming in El Cajon, CA (www.hi-techwelding.com) specializes in making titanium parts through a process called super-plastic forming that uses intense heat and gas pressure to create strong, lightweight titanium-formed honeycomb structures.

Hi-Tech Welding chose the SolidWorks Office Premium package because it included both PDMWorks® and COSMOSWorks Designer at the right price. The company uses PDMWorks to manage and track drawings and assemblies and COSMOSWorks Designer to analyze their complex sheet metal parts.

Currently, High-Tech Welding and Forming is designing a lightweight, quick acting watertight door for the US Navy that can withstand high-pressure and shock loads. The door is made of two thin-walled sheets of titanium metal. One has a highly-formed, pocketed core for added strength. In the past, the company performed hand calculations, which took up too much time. “COSMOSWorks Designer runs thousands of calculations quickly and works with SolidWorks parts,” says High-Tech’s CAD manager Scott Kettle, “It’s such a valuable tool.” The product saves the company time and ensures its products are able to withstand real-world operating conditions.

Verari Systems (www.verari.com) in San Diego, CA provides supercomputer clusters and a full line of rack mounted servers and workstations to oil and gas, commercial, and animation companies. The company purchased SolidWorks Office Premium for both COSMOSWorks Designer and SolidWorks Routing.

Verari relies on COSMOSWorks Designer to make sure the tall, heavy computer racks it designs won’t topple over. “We make racks in excess of 1,300 pounds and design them to fit into a small footprint,” says Greg Miller, senior manager of research and development engineering at Verari. The racks are 87 inches tall and take up 24x30 inches of floor space. He adds, “Designer gives us what we need, which is static stress analysis. The program is extremely easy and intuitive to use. Even my beginning designers were able to grasp it quickly.”

The company plans to implement SolidWorks Routing to design the cable bundles in its computer racks. In the past, the company estimated the length of wiring based on a 2D layout and hand cut the cable to fit prototypes. If there were changes, they had to go back into SolidWorks to change the design. “SolidWorks Routing is going to reduce the time it takes to get our cable assemblies into production,” says Miller.

Take the SolidWorks Office Premium online tour to learn more.