How to do FEA on a Solidworks designed vacuum vessel

[Plasmech]

I am a 100% rookie on Ansys workbench 11. I have no idea (yet) how to use it. My ultimate short term goal is to analyze a pressure vessel that I designed in Solidwotks 2007. Can someone give me some general guidance on where to even begin? I do plan on working through the tutorials however I don't see anything in any tutorial on how to anlyze a Solidworks assembly? Thanks *immensely* for any help!

 

[gurmeet2003]

Plasmech,

I do not understand your problem. It seems that you have a solid model that you want to analyze in workbench. All you need is a 'Plug in' for solid works. You can buy this from ANSYS.

Gurmeet

 

[Stringmaker]

Are you asking how to operate Ansys WB or how to do the analysis?

 

[Plasmech]

I'm really asking how to import a Solidworks assembly into Ansys.

 

[cbrn]

Hi,
as somebody else suggested: do you have the direct "CAD-Connection" between Ansys and SolidWorks via the plugin, or not? The answer to your question strictly depends upon this one.

Regards

 

[zubaj]

Even with the Solidworks plug-in, this can be a very difficult task if your geometry is complex. I'd suggest converting the Solidworks part files into parasolid files and then importing them into Ansys. I've had more success with that than importing directly from Solidworks with and without the plug-in.

 

[cbrn]

Zubaj:
I really don't understand why this should be, since SW core is based upon Parasolid. Or at least, the explanation I see is that the SW geometry was not 100% topologically "correct": as you say, it may happen with very complex parts with enormous history-trees. Converting it to "dumb" Parasolid forces the 3D kernel to re-examine the topology from scratch and convert SW-custom features to "basic" ones of the Parasolid definition. The "forced-regen" can be obtained with a keyboard shortcut I don't remember, however, without having to "dumbize" the whole model. Other explanation: internal tolerances.

Regards

 

[zubaj]

cbrn,

I'm not sure why Solidworks' native part files work so poorly when imported into Ansys either. But when using highly complex geometry, I get missing faces, incomplete lines, and other symptoms of poor geometry import. (Which has made my life difficult for the past several months. )I should also note that these problems are worse in Ansys Classic than in Workbench. But with Workbench's minimal support of higher end functions and scriptability, it's hard to use it for anything but single routine analyses.