PLASTICS TECH TIP: Configuration Integration (with video)

SOLIDWORKS Plastics gives you a little more flexibility than our other simulation tools with respect to simulation model management. In particular, you can choose if you want to link your simulations to your SOLIDWORKS CAD configurations. This is a handy way to manage multiple Plastics analyses but you only have to manage one CAD file. For example, if you have just run a plastics simulation and you want to change a gate location, material, or process setting you can copy the current model and retain those results while making a model change and re-running the duplicate.Here’s a quick guide on how we link the two.

In a nutshell:

– When we have Plastics Integration turned on, Plastics will load up the Plastics model/simulation that matches the configuration name.
– If there’s no match, the Plastics tree is blank.

You can use the Plastics “Model Manager” to copy and move around the Plastics simulations.

Steps (video example also included):

1. Go to Plastics Help and make sure Configuration integration is checked.
2. From within the Plastics model/config that you want to copy (eg. “Old Config”), create a new CAD configuration (eg. “New Config”).
3. The Plastic Feature Manager will now be blank, since there is no Plastics model named “NewConfig” yet.
4. In the Plastics Model Manager, browse to your working directory using the “…” option; this will always bring you back to this folder.
5. Right-click on the “Old Config” Plastics model and choose Copy. Now paste this model into the same directory. It will rename to “OldConfig_01.”
6. Then right-click on the copy and rename it to “New Config.”
7. When we re-open the “New Config,” it will load up the Plastics simulation of the same name.
8. Now you can make changes to “New Config” and re-run and still have “Old Config” to compare results.