Hi! My name is Antonio and I work for Aker Solutions Brazil and I would like to ask your advise.

This is the first time that I use the Solidworks forum.

Let's go to the question: Does anyone know how to get the geometric centre (centroid) of a assembly model easily?

I mean the true geometric centre, not the center of mass / gravity (see the atached picture) or centre of buoyancy (the CoB many times is near to the CoG).

As we know, Solidworks does not give us this information directly.

For very simple models (e.g. cube, sphere, pyramid, prisms, parallelepiped, so on) this information is implicit.

But, when we model a complex assembly or part is hard to get this information.

Does anyone have a tip? I think the easiest way is convert my solidworks model to open in FEA software (we tried to use Abaqus and it is very slow in our case).

Unfortunately, I cannot share the model with you to do tests.

I tried to save my assembly file as part twice: 1x as external sufaces and 1x external components. Both crashed during saving.

Now I will try to save as parasolid to see what happens - my file is a 100Mb assembly and it takes +/-5,5 minutes to open.

For us there is no problem to get the Center of Mass (solidworks gives us) and the Center of Bouyancy (there is a specific software for that).

We have discussed here and we found 2 methods to do that: 1.open the file in Abaqus (slow); 2. Re-model all the assembly filing all air pockets and then apply the same density in all parts (we dont know the time).

Actually this information requested by our customer is something new for us because they are requesting to do installation calculation.

If you want to have one idea about why we need this information, there is a presentation shared on the following link:

http://www.omae2006.sea2ice.com/pdfs/OMAE2006-92658-small.pdf

We need this data because it is a input for "Pendulous Installation Method" developed by Petrobras few years ago to install subsea manifolds.

Perhaps the way could be a different software, but I'm not pretty sure about it.

Thank you guys.