Motovated > Engineering Tips and Tricks

Engineering Tips and Tricks



Design Tips

Designing Mating Parts with Rotational Symmetry
See how rotational symmetry can be used to lower tooling, setup and manufacturing costs.
Zinc Coatings
Looking for a corrosion-resistant coating for you steel product? Here's a quick breakdown of the options under zinc coating for steel products.
Rule of Thumb for Section Design
A handy rule of thumb for quickly estimating the strength of engineering sections without calculation.
Living Plastic Hinge
Hints for designing thin plastic sections as to act as a living plastic hinge for plastic products.
Saving money with Machined parts
The importance of considering tooling when designing machined parts to save money in the machine shop.
Design with Inflection
With clever design Inflection Points can be utilized in components to lower stress around welds.
Torsional Loading Design
A comparison of cross bracing designs under torsional loading conditions.
Folding Sheet Metal
A rule for designing effective folded sheet metal designs for ease of fabrication.
Preloading Nuts for Longer Life
Have you got a difficult bolted joint? See why increasing the pre-load on bolts may allow them to live.
Sheet Metal Forming
Adding formed features to sheet metal parts can improve the strength and aesthetic appeal of a design.

Analysis Tips

FEA Meshing Teqhniques
See how SolidWorks "Curvature Based Mesh" tool significantly cuts down on the time spent meshing complex models!
FEA Jig Theory
See how to apply good boundary conditions in FEA so that the part is not over-constrained and can still deform in any direction without adding extra stiffening to the part.
Beam Impact
See how a beam designed for impact loads differs to a beam designed for static bending.
Torsion Section
We highlight some general rules for selecting sections for torsion, and show how to get angular displacement values out of a FEA.
Weld Analysis Tools
SolidWorks Simulation 2010 has some clever new weld analysis tools.
Living Plastic Hinge
An explaination of inplane and large displacement tools using an example flat-walled tank analysis.
Inplane Effects and Limitations of Free FEA Software
A comparison of a simple example with and without inplane effects.
Hertzian Surface Contact
Check contact stresses by using the Hertzian Contact Equation and maximise machine life.
Fillet Weld FEA
See why a bigger weld is not always stronger and can have higher manufacturing costs in the long run.
Optimal Design for Impact loading
Maximise life under Impact Loading while minimizing material used based on energy absorbsion.
Cast Bracket Redesign
This hint shows how FEA can be used to Optimize the Design of a Bracket to reduce manufacturing cost.
Mesh Refinement on Re-entrant corners
This tip relates to analysis of re-entrant stresses in Finite Element Analysis (FEA).

←Back to Links