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GMGeorge Maddever08/11/2013

Hi All,

Just a quick question I've not found an easy answer to, but I'm looking to simulate some conveyors in SolidWorks, nothing fancy, just some straight, flightless conveyors in a system.

Now I've seen all the Youtube videos about how to animate a conveyor and have tried a few tricks but yet to find a really satisfactory situation.

Ones like this:

http://youtu.be/Tsrc2lMdH08

I've tried, but it seems pretty flaky and often seems to take ages to run the simulation, for even a simple conveyor, or it crashes.

I'm currently trying a situation where I have a hidden long, flat planar part moving by a linear motor 0,5mm or so above my modelled conveyor belt surface. This also works, but also seems to take a fair while to simulate. I have a pretty decent sized assembly with some event based motion, but for some reason, just making my components move along the conveyor seems to be the biggest use of time.

I could make the conveyor "flighted", which would push the product along, but don't really want to do this.

Am I better to just add linear motors or forces to the conveyed product components themselves and let it slide along a conveyor surface or is there a way I could improve the efficiency of my current model?

It seems to me that having an off-the-shelf "conveyor" motor in SW Motion would be a good thing, where you could specify a belt surface and any free part that fell atop that surface would be conveyed, the maths should be pretty simple.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks,

George.