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With the acquisition of SRAC by Dassault Systemes in March 2001, enhanced practical and commercial integration of the Cosmos range of products with SolidWorks looked inevitable.
Indeed SolidWorks itself now ships with a basic set of finite element (FE) tools in the guise of CosmosXpress, using a simple wizard based approach to analyse individual parts in order to understand and improve designs as early as possible in the design process.
Cosmos clearly also offer a wide range of analysis tools that exceed the needs of the general design team.
CosmosWorks offers an extensive set of FE tools and is complemented by product bundles offering integrated motion simulation in CosmosMotion and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in CosmosFloWorks.
CosmosWorks itself has two levels, professional (£6,500) offering linear static, frequency buckling, thermal, shell analysis, assemblies and gap analysis and Advanced Professional (£9,500) that adds non linear and fatigue capabilities.
The greater SolidWorks integration in the 2003 release make it both easier and quicker to use.
By using the SolidWorks Property Manager, dialog boxes no longer clutter up the graphics area and hide the model.
By using standard input fields, geometry selection lists for applying loads and constraints can be modified without exiting the input dialog box.
The direction of loads and restraints can also be previewed and direction modified before being applied.
Analysis inputs such as material, restraints, loads, mesh size and contact resistance can also be defined as parameters with values entered in a table enabling changes to apply to multiple studies.