Solidworks assy files into Nastran

[trace]

Importing a solidworks .prt generated iges file into nastran2001 seems to work for us but when we import .sldasm files, via iges, the geometry goes astray. I would be interested to hear from anyone who had the same problem and what , if any solution is available.

 

[tstanley]

It may not work for your more critical application, but for me, analysing a weldment, I had to "join" all the parts in the Solidworks assembly. Then export it as a parasolid file that Nastran could read. In my case I didn't really want to analyse the welds.

Tom S.

 

[Timelord]

trace,

I use ACIS (.sat) files when sending assemblies to NASTRAN. They come in as seperate parts, so they can be assigned different properties. The one thing I had to do was set up the export from Solidworks to use an early version (Ver 8.0) of the ACIS kernel even though I am using a 2003 release of NASTRAN for Windows. When exporting, click on the options button in the save as dialog box and set the version back to 8.0. Watch the scale when importing.

Timelord

 

[trace]

Thanks for the suggestions: we found that we were missing the parasolid importing license. We now have a trial license and by saving the model as a parasolid, (Both Nastran and solidworks have parasolid kernels) and using the new function "midplane", our solids were easily meshed.
The only drawback is our contract stress guys make good money from modelling from our Autocad drawings so they aren't happy.