What’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2021?

Product design collaboration is important for your product. That means it’s important for your customers. And it’s important for your design teams, too. So, why not make it user-centric, and simple?

Let Designers work together from anywhere, anytime on any size assembly. Make design collaboration easy for your teams, invite key stakeholders into the discussion, and see the positive effects ripple across your product lifecycle.

SOLIDWORKS 2021 brings a slew of improvements, new features and tools that are all driven by user experience – with collaboration in mind.

So, let’s take a look at some of the most exciting updates available with SOLIDWORKS 2021.

Detailing Mode

Detailing Mode enables users to open drawings containing large assemblies, lots of sheets, many configurations or resource intensive views in seconds. Enhancements to this mode include:

• Improved drawing creation performance
• Improvements to adding hole callouts, editing existing dimensions and annotations, and adding detail, break, and crop views

Assemblies

SOLIDWORKS Assemblies consist of many components, either parts or other assemblies, called subassemblies. This core tool has several key functionality improvements in SOLIDWORKS 2021.

• Export interference detection reports with images to Microsoft Excel
• Use Change mate alignments on edit to warn you when mate changes result in errors that can be avoided by flipping the alignment of the edited mate
• Automatically resolve lightweight components on expanding the Feature Manager node.
• Save defeatured models as configurations, change between full and simplified versions, and mimic other configurations
• Benefit from improvements for design tables, exploded views, mates, and mirror and pattern features
• Open, save, and close assemblies with significant performance improvements
• Use curve length in chain patterns along paths, not chord length
• Detect and report circular references

Discover more in the online course 2021 SOLIDWORKS Essentials for Assembly Design – delivered by our partners, SolidProfessor.

Model Display

• Work with improved performance of occlusion culling, silhouette edges and drawings, and quick configuration switches

User Interface

• Pick colours for appearances from external applications
• Search for tools on Shortcut Bars and Commands tabs in the Customize dialog box
• Display translated feature names in the Feature Manager design tree

Parts and Features

• Use Redo for more than 60 features and tools in parts
• Add edge flanges on nonplanar tangent edges in sheet metal parts and flatten complex flanges
• Add and evaluate equations in file properties and cut list properties
• Transfer part-level materials when you insert or mirror a part, derived component part, or mirrored component part

Discover more in the online course 2021 SOLIDWORKS Essentials for Part Design – delivered by our partners, SolidProfessor.

3DEXPERIENCE Connector for SOLIDWORKS

• Use the Derived Format Converter to create derived outputs for broader consumption and exact geometry to use in downstream design, simulation, and manufacturing applications
• Use multiple sheets and markups on drawings, with improved drawings quality
• Manage Open tools with similar options to SOLIDWORKS when opening data from the 3DEXPERIENCE platform
• Control configurations to save on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform

SOLIDWORKS Simulation

• Use mesh diagnostics to identify, isolate, and prompt to fix poor-quality elements
• Use faster and more robust meshing with accuracy bonding improvements
• Access improved convergence through contact stabilization
• Get faster contact simulation calculations
• Automatically calculate and apply geometry correction terms for contact between curved surfaces
• Ensure accuracy for bonding interactions to enable robust and fast meshing
• Get a more accurate auto-selection of the equation solver with commensurate improvements in speed and memory usage

SOLIDWORKS Electrical

• Use splines, lines, or other sketch entities to route harnesses in 3D
• Use multiple wires or cables to pass through and arrange through clips
• Join wires using splice component or splice without component
• Access support for end terminations in Connector Tables, Interconnects, and the Accessories Library
• Combine 3D representations and flattened areas in harness board drawings
• Archive electrical projects automatically or by schedule
• Generate PDF files of projects up to nine times faster depending on project size
• Update engineering units for wires, cables, and electrical harness data using the Routing Library Manager (RLM)
• Use the Terminal Types Manager to handle terminals and interconnections
• Bring information on end terminations from SOLIDWORKS Electrical schematics into 3D for more complete documentation
• Fit entire workflows, from schematic to 3D, for wires without end terminations
• Leverage Microsoft Excel for electrical design automation with an add-in to streamline the process

SOLIDWORKS Plastics

• Streamline the plastics simulation workflow with the redesigned Plastics Manager tree
• Improve cooling results accuracy with enhanced baffling and bubbler modelling and meshing
• Access more accurate and up-to-date plastics material data

SOLIDWORKS Model-Based Definition

• Publish sheet metal bend tables as 3D PDF files
• Define driving and driven locating dimensions as semantically correct datum targets
• Take advantage of improved 3D PDF display quality