If your assembly moves, COSMOSMotion™ can help you design more easily and efficiently. Starting with Service Pack 4.0, COSMOSMotion is included with SolidWorks® Office Premium at no extra cost, enabling more designers to put this motion simulation tool to the test. COSMOSMotion is fully integrated with SolidWorks and COSMOSWorks® Designer FEA (finite element analysis) software, which also comes in the Office Premium package.

COSMOSMotion lets you simulate the mechanical operations of your SolidWorks assemblies and the physical forces they generate. You can determine power consumption, size motors and actuators, lay out linkages, develop cams, understand gear drives, size springs and dampers, and even determine how parts interact.

Testing a designer’s intuition
Now with COSMOSMotion at their fingertips, more designers may find more uses for it than originally thought. Many times, engineers rely on intuition, manual calculations, or physical prototypes to determine how assemblies will move. While these methods are often sufficient, COSMOSMotion enables you to do the work faster and test your intuition.

Plus, you can apply COSMOSMotion for more than just “yes” or “no” answers. “It’s not only about checking to see if a design will fail,” says Suchit Jain, vice president of analysis software at SolidWorks Corporation. “Designers who start using COSMOSMotion will find that it allows them to design more efficient products. COSMOSMotion, for instance, may tell you that the motor you’re using is more powerful than what you need. You can then produce the product with a less expensive motor and reduce costs.”

Jain also stresses that COSMOSMotion is not a niche product. “It applies to any industry,” he explains. “You can use it for any assembly that has motion, no matter how simple or complex. And why not? The program is simple and easy to use.”

Scissor lift to locks
Syncroness, Inc., located in Westminster, Colorado, is one company that found a multitude of uses for COSMOSMotion. The product design firm originally purchased COSMOSMotion to help design a scissor lift that tilts and lifts up to 450 pounds of weight. A cam-roller pulls the load until a pull-rod takes over.

The scissor lift had to tilt and lift 450 lb. and seamlessly transition from a cam-roller to a pull-rod mechanism.

“Making that transition from cam-roller to pull-rod completely seamless was a difficult challenge,” notes Syncroness CEO Greg Langley. His design team had been trying to manually work out the complex motion problems with the help of MathCAD, but it was taking a lot of time.

“Every time we changed the geometry, we had to rewrite the math model and that took two to three days,” Langley says. “Whereas COSMOSMotion enabled us to simulate the motion in two to three hours.”

Now that they own the program, Syncroness uses it to design any assembly that moves. “We use COSMOSMotion whenever we have a mechanism,” said Langley. Recently, Syncroness used the software to check the movement of a simple lock mechanism. Everything looked right, but COSMOSMotion indicated otherwise.

“The mechanism would not run,” Langley explains. “Even though it was a straightforward design, COSMOSMotion allowed us to see that we had an overconstrained condition.” The problem was much easier to fix on a computer than after building a prototype.

Langley says COSMOSMotion is straightforward to operate. For new users, he recommends the tutorials. “They are fairly simple and demonstrate the COSMOSMotion capabilities well,” he adds. “After a day with the tutorials, we began making effective use of the tool.”

A faster fruit sorter
The ability to understand motion problems faster is a key asset of COSMOSMotion. When Monee, Illinois-based Bimba Manufacturing Company, a maker of pneumatic actuation products and controls, got a call to sort out a fruit sorter, it applied COSMOSMotion to the problem. The customer, a manufacturer of fruit-processing machines, was experiencing frequent actuator failures. In the processing machine, fruit travels down a conveyor to a sorting mechanism, where a lever attached to the end of an actuator rod kicks out damaged and poorly sized fruit. And that’s where it ran into problems.

Bimba used COSMOSMotion to sort out problems in a fruit sorter on the computer screen. Shown here, graphical output from COSMOSMotion at the moment of impact between the fruit and lever arm.

“The bearing on the actuator was failing frequently, which necessitated shutting down the machine for repair,” says William Teach, Bimba project engineer. “We used COSMOSMotion to conduct a kinematics analysis at the point of impact on the bearing, and discovered that the customer had increased the speed of the machine beyond our actuator design specifications.”

The customer reduced the speed of the machine as a short-term solution, and now Bimba is developing a new cylinder that will perform at the faster speed.

“In the past, we would have had to duplicate the failure in our model shop, which would have been more costly and time consuming,” he adds. “With COSMOSMotion, we were able to pinpoint the problem and resolve our customer’s problem inside one week.”

As a result, more and more of Bimba’s customers are asking for a kinematics analysis to confirm their applications.

Office Premium customers on Subscription Service can upgrade their software when they download Service Pack 4.0.

Learn more about COSMOSMotion.