SolidThinking

A question that I have been getting recently is how to create material properties from various sources for use in SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks.  The following is the day in the life of how you can input material propery data:

1.  SolidWorks has a built in material editor, whcih has about 50+ materials ranging from Steels to Woods.  The materials database includes information for density and other physical properties for finite element analysis.  It also allows for color and rendering options as well as the material crosshatch pattern for a section view in drawings.  This library is read only, but you can create new material libraries based on materials.

2.  This library can be expanded by using www.matweb.com, and downloading material property information pre-formatted for SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks.  There is a small annual fee to be a member (It’s around $70).  It is an incredible timesaver and I openly wept the first time I used it.  (All that time looking for materials catalogs and manually inputting properties to use for FEA, then converting units systems like there’s no tomorrow.)

3.  COSMOSWorks also has a library that has 200+ materials built in.  It is easy to edit and allows you to swap units systems on the fly.  It also identifies which material properties are important for different types of analysis.  The great thing here is that you can use different material model types, add material curve information for nonlinear analysis as well as fatigue calculations.  The www.matweb.com materials also work seamlessly.

I encourage you  to place the materials libraries on a central server so that everybody in your company can take advantage of this data.  I have created a movie showing the above process.  Here is a link to view it:

http://webpages.charter.net/mplafleche/MaterialWorld/Untitled.wmv

Enjoy and have fun!