I'm a previous ANSYS user (from a while ago) and I'm going to be using solidworks simulation in my next job.
I'm really disappointed in the quality of the simulation software. I've got installed on three different computers (multiple times on each computer to make sure it's installed right), and I've had nothing but issues with simulation. This is a total opposite of the the modeling environment, which is works very nicely.
Everything was going well, when suddenly, my simulation wouldn't run. After meshing, it gave the error "Midside nodes on two edges of an element are merged, element: (reducing mesh tolerance or specifying a higher no. of points for Jacobian check for meshing may help)".
So, I messed around with the mesh settings. No luck. I removed most of model to see if I could still run any simulation, when I got the error message "A Sharing violation occured while accessing an unnamed file". Then, it stopped solving, but the solver window didn't close, so I couldn't do anything else. When I closed SW, the solver window stayed open, but I couldn't close it without going to task manager and ending it.
Right there, there were three bugs, the error message that is only meaningful to the SW programming team, the fact that solving can end without closing the window which leaves solidworks in a state that it needs to be restarted, the solving window does not close when SW closes, and the solving window can enter a state where it cannot be closed without going to task manager.
My questions are: why do the two errors occur, how do I fix them, and should I just use ANSYS 2007 instead? I'm doing very basic simulation, but I have no desire to waste hours of my life fighting crap software.
John,
I am an ANSYS user who has much less experience with SolidWorks Simulation. The few times that I or my colleagues have used SolidWorks Simulation it has worked well. These have usually been relatively straightforward; when we have more difficult analyses to run it usually falls on me to do it and I do it in ANSYS. That is partially because I am more familiar with ANSYS and partially because I am a bit leary of using SW Sim on the tough stuff. The other guys use SW Sim because it's easy to use, unlike ANSYS. Since you are used to lrunning ANSYS, this probably isn't much of an issue, although I always struggle after not using it for a few months.
From following this forum, it seems to me that SW Sim IS more buggy than ANSYS. On the other hand, a lot of people are getting acceptable results and you say that your simulations are pretty basic, so I wouldn't expect you to have many problems.
In a couple of cases we have run either the same or a very similar analyses in SW Sim and ANSYS and SW Sim was substantially faster. None of the analyses took more than a few minutes to run, so the faster solution time didn't really matter to us.
Meshing does seem to be one of SW Sim's weaknesses. We originally chose ANSYS over the competition, which included COSMOS, the predecessor of SW Sim, because the fellow who did the evaluation thought that ANSYS had the best mesher. (On the other hand, he was most familiar with ANSYS, having used it in school.) The other guys have run into a few cases where they had difficulty meshing parts, but they always managed to work their way around it.
I would worry about what operating system you will need to run such old code.
Jerry S.