With every SOLIDWORKS installation, there are a set of additional tools that get installed along with the software that can be very useful. Most of you may not have known any of these tools existed unless you've been introduced to it, or discovered it while digging through the SOLIDWORKS installation folders, and who would do that? The tool I want to introduce today is the SOLIDWORKS Simulation Cleaning utility, which is found in the default installation directory:
C:\Program Files\SOLIDWORKS Corp\SOLIDWORKS\Simulation\Utilities
This tool is used to permanently delete any Simulation data, such as your setup and some of the results information, from any SOLIDWORKS part or assembly file. Now, you may be asking yourself, “Why would anyone want to wipe the Simulation data from a SOLIDWORKS file?” It really depends on the situation, but here are a few examples:
- You’re working on a project for a client, and you want to share the file/s with other parties, but they won't need any of the Simulation information.
- In General troubleshooting. There have been a few cases where I’ve seen SOLIDWORKS crash as a result of trying to load the Simulation studies when turning on the add-in. For some unknown reason, the sim data was corrupt and we used the utility to clean the file. Please note, however, that this may not always be the cause of SOLIDWORKS crashing and I highly recommend contacting out Technical Support team to diagnose the issue before deleting anything.
Before running the utility, you want to ensure that the file you’re going to be cleaning is not open in SOLIDWORKS. It is also good practice to make a back-up copy of the original file. Double-click the simulation cleaning utility icon to run the utility and you'll see that we have the option to remove specific study types such as Simulation, Motion, and Flow Simulation. If you want to remove all data, be sure to check all product boxes.
Now all we need to do is Browse for the file, hit the Clean File button, and voilà! The selected file has now been purged of any of the selected Simulation data. Note, however, that if you want to ensure that all the Simulation data have been completely removed, you can navigate to where the result files are stored (default location is where the part /assembly file is saved). You can find a video demonstration of this utility, along with other useful tips, on our YouTube channel! Thank you for reading!
