Articles by Ryan Navarro

SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation is a powerful, general-purpose Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package integrated directly into the SOLIDWORKS CAD environment.  

The base package of Flow Simulation includes the ability to simulate fluid flow, heat transfer, mixing of multiple fluids, and rotation. This combination of features makes it well suited for analyzing a variety of industrial equipment. We’ll look at a number of cases in this blog article and associated webinar.  

SOLIDWORKS 2023 brought many new features to SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation. This article will detail the most notable features and outline the rest. 

Drag forces due to air resistance are a key design factor for vehicles on the ground and in the sky. Current trends toward electrification have put even further emphasis on minimizing drag as a means to extend range or increase flight time when all other things are equal. This is relevant both for the designers of airframes and chassis, as well as suppliers of exterior-mounted third party equipment.

Performing predictions of lift and drag is a very straightforward process in SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation and can be performed early on during design. This reduces the need for iterations of scale prototypes and wind tunnel tests and provides additional confidence in a design before committing to prototyping. Design variations can be quickly analyzed by cloning Flow Simulation projects between multiple SOLIDWORKS configurations.

As electronics power density continues to increase, thermal challenges become increasingly important to address. These challenges are especially pronounced today in the electric vehicle industry, as EV battery packs may require heating in cold climates and cooling under fast charging and high current draw.

In our recent webinar, our analysis pro shared how SOLIDWORKS Flow Simulation can allow rapid CAD-embedded virtual testing of thermal performance. Examples are presented in the case of liquid-cooled battery packs and general air-cooled electronics.

We also cover techniques that can help speed up solution times and get answers into engineer’s and designer’s hands faster – which can be applied broadly across any sort of thermal problem.

SOLIDWORKS Network Licensing (or SNL for short) relies on a lightweight server component to handout licenses to client PCs. As users load SOLIDWORKS products, the appropriate licenses are checked out from the license pool. When a user closes SOLIDWORKS or unloads an add-in such as SOLIDWORKS Simulation, the license is automatically returned to the pool.

If a user knows they need to go off-network, they can “borrow” or temporarily check out a license from the license server. Borrowing a license checks out the license for the assigned period of time (up to 30 days) and removes it from the available license pool. The licenses automatically return after the borrowing period or can be manually returned sooner using the SolidNetworkLicense Manager Client.