UES International Solves Design Challenges with SolidWorks Simulation from Solidtec

UES International Pty Ltd is an Australian family owned company established in 1904, and is a leading global supplier and manufacturer of Seating, Marine and Transportation Hardware.

UES International Pty Ltd

UES International Pty Ltd is an Australian family owned company established in 1904, and is a leading global supplier and manufacturer of Seating, Marine and Transportation Hardware. UES also have a division dedicated to commercial, transport, and Healthcare seating. The projects involving seating for marine applications provide interesting and diverse challenges.  “We’ve done some work with Austal Ships who are another Australian icon, and some of our seating projects need to withstand up to 12 G’s of collision impact. We use a 3D printer for dimensional testing, but SolidWorks is essential for simulating high G-force collision testing. My colleague Brandon Clark and I have done some Simulation training with Solidtec which will prove invaluable when using SolidWorks Simulation to test and validate our seating designs for the marine industry in the near future” Daniel Behjat, Industrial Designer.

Challenges and Solutions

• Material tolerances can be assessed easily
• Reduction of over - design to maximise cost effectiveness in manufacturing and assembly stages. 
• Minimising time taken to create design concepts
• Expensive physical testing can be given higher foreseeable success  

Favourite Aspects of SolidWorks

• Ability to visualise and easily communicate design concepts
• Real life experience whilst designing by applying material properties in 3D
• Solidtec Solutions training – sped up the time taken to transition to SolidWorks
• Availability of third party partner products to extent SolidWorks functionality even further
• Improved design productivity
• Ease of use – SolidWorks layout means the software is intuitive and logical to use

“It costs around $20,000 to dynamically test one of our seats for the marine industry. They need to withstand a collision impact of up to 12G (for obvious reasons) so having SolidWorks help refine the design before this expensive testing exercise is very valuable indeed”. Daniel Behjat, Industrial Designer.

SolidWorks

UES implemented SolidWorks in 2009 and use the software extensively for their seating and hardware development programs. “SolidWorks has saved us huge amounts of time and money. Our productivity levels have increased and it is easy to see that we are developing products faster. SolidWorks has a superior user interface and its functionality and ease of use is superb” - Daniel Behjat, Industrial Designer.

Solidtec

“One of the reasons we chose Solidtec as our SolidWorks provider is that they have great technical support staff. They are very experienced and knowledgeable and always seem ready to help with the right answers. Solidtec also have regular events including free webinars for customers and we find that really valuable”. Daniel Behjat, Industrial Designer.

“It’s great to see companies utilising the range of SolidWorks products to solve differing design challenges and to save time during their design process. Companies like UES International are great examples of how SolidWorks Simulation helps Solidtec customers design more innovative products faster, and eliminate the need for physical testing, resulting in improved bottom line results.” – Shane Preston, CEO, Solidtec.

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Text Size driven by Design Table

This is a post that relates to a question I was asked last week on controlling the size of fonts via design tables. My initial answer was "no" as font size cant be controlled via a design table, but after a bit of thought about what the customer was trying to achieve, could a scale feature be controlled? The answer is YES and quite conveniently the answer is located in the SolidWorks help, but I have provided screenshots on the step by step process required.

Step 1.

Create your Word using sketch text and an extrude. Unfortunately sketch scale cant be controlled via a design table so it will need to a feature that is scaled.

Step 2.

Add your scale feature and make sure to select all the letters as bodies. It is not important what is used as the scale origin.

Step 3.

Inserting a design table. Note you must select a parameter such as one of the dimesions used for the layout to get the design table up and running. You dont need to change this parameter, but it does help the auto create option.

Step 4.

Adding the parameter to control the scale which should be "$X_AXIS@scale_feature_name" so in my example the parameter is $x_AXIS@scale1. You can also control the "Y" and "Z" should you choose the scaling not to be uniform.

Step 5.

Exit the table and then edit the table to re-enter of which you should now see your scale size showing in the table.

Step 6.

Change the scale size in the table and now you have a Word size driven by a design table.

I know this post will be useful for one customer and hopefully it aids a few others. Please never be shy of contacting your local Support Engineer with such questions as we are here to help you and enjoy a challenge.

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How to place a point at the Center of Mass

How to place a point at the Center of Mass of a solid and add reference planes through the point so that they update as the solid changes.
 

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