Presentation files for Charlottesville user group meeting
Last week I was invited back to present at the SolidWorks User Group that meets at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I started the group in 2005, and lead it until 2009 when I moved too far away to continue with the group. They let me pick the topic, and I combined Everyday Surfacing and Body Management. Of course we got pretty off track talking about some of the details of NURBS and Brep that I think are important for any kind of CAD work.Before my presentation, one of the groupmembers got up and showed this video of Bre Pettis of Makerbot demoing his wares on the Colbert Report. It’s funny that some people who should be pretty well informed treat this technology as if it is new and mind-blowing, but SLA (or variants such as fused deposition) has been commercially available since the early 90s. It was pretty cool, because the room where we had the meeting was right across the hall from a room where the school had several SLA machines set up. Very cool stuff we never had when I was in college.
Anyway, back to my presentation. The main points of the presentation were:
- You can use surfaces like reference geometry
- Surfaces aren’t just fancy lofts, they can be used for machine design
- Surfaces can be used with FEA and CFD when plate elements are appropriate
- Solids and surfaces are interchangeable
- To work with surfaces you need a good understanding of body management
- Multibody techniques have many uses.
My presentations aren’t well annotated because most of the comments made during themeeting are off the cuff. If you have any questions about the material in the slides, just drop me a note. To download the presentation, click on the image above.
I do have an archive of powerpoint files from earlier presentations I’ve done, if you are interested. You can find them here going back to about 2004. The main website for CVSWUG isat this link.