I am a beginner studying ANSYS right now and I wanted to know from the experiences and knowhow of most of you - is Solid Works the most common solid modelling software used in ANSYS FEA? Thanks for the tip.
I don't know about the most common, but I've used Ansys with Solidworks, and it is a nice interface. One of the key things to me (from my standpoint as a Design Engineer, others may disagree) about a good interface between CAD and FEA is the ability to parameterize geometry in the FEA software, so that you can quickly analyze different versions of a part while trying to optimize your design. (For example, changing the diameter or length of a part.)
You don't get that type of thing with STEP and parasolid importion, and you have to reapply all of your Boundary Conditions and other settings each time you import a new part.
I think that there can be a lot to be said for integration. (Note I said "can".) We use Cosmos (virtually all their products, not just CosmosWorks.) We already used Cosmos before we got SW, so that had a lot to do with it. However, the tight integration is very useful and saves us a lot of time. We do some quite complex analysis. I would think that any Gold Partner solution (and most Silvers) should give the same sort of advantages. In our case, that fact that DS/SW own Cosmos does not hurt the equasion any.
I was - and he did. So at least I didn't get coal.....
OK, OK, It's a reference to my holiday sig. "Be naughty - Save Santa a trip..."