I now have two books each on CAD and on FEA with SolidWorks (I am installing SW Premium, not the full Simulation package). None of these tomes appears to define the "Standard Planes."
The only place I've actually encountered these planes is in CSV numerical output tables (made for me by another user) of nodal displacements from an FEA analysis of an assembly. I was getting inexplicable results with "Top Plane" specified for the output and was told then, "The 'Front' plane (at the assembly level, if you are using an assembly) is supposed to be the referenced 'global' coordinate system for a collection of parts. Likewise the 'Front' plane is supposed to be the referenced 'global' coordinate system for a single part." Changing the output to "Front Plane" did the trick, although I have no idea what was really going on.
Can somebody please explain the meaning of these planes and how the relate to the global coordinate system (whatever that is) in a part or an assembly? -- John Willett
Perhaps this looks like a dumb question. Now that I'm running SW Premium 2014, of course I see the planes (Front = X-Y; Top = X-Z; Right = Y-Z) that show up as soon as you open a new sketch. I suppose these are the so-called default "Standard Planes." I still don't know, however, how these planes relate to the default "Datum Planes" (Tertiary, Primary, Secondary), whatever they are. (The preceding terminology came from a book of SW tutorials by Planchard.) Are they the identical, respectively as listed? If so, why have two different naming systems?
Maybe a better question is, "Why are these planes called 'default'?" Can other options than the defaults be defined for these planes? If so, what might they do for me?
More importantly for my purposes, I don't know how selections like "Selected reference : Front Plane," etc. relate to the coordinate systems for displacements/stresses when used to dump to a CSV table of nodal results from a simulation. Is this a question only for the Simulation section, or is it more general within SolidWorks? -- John Willett