Kinematics and Motion Simulation
The most popular virtual prototyping tool for SolidWorks, SolidWorks Motion™ lets you make sure your designs will work before you build them.

Included inside SolidWorks Premium, SolidWorks Simulation Professional, and SolidWorks Simulation Premium, SolidWorks Motion is the standard virtual prototyping package for engineers and designers interested in understanding the performance of their assemblies.

SolidWorks Motion enables engineers to size motors/actuators, determine power consumption, layout linkages, develop cams, understand gear drives, size springs/dampers, and determine how contacting parts behave.

The result is a quantitative reduction in physical prototyping costs and reduced product development time. SolidWorks Motion also provides qualitative benefits such as the ability to consider more designs, risk reduction, and the availability of valuable information early in the design process.

Features and Benefits of SolidWorks Motion

• Leverage the power of SolidWorks - Included as part of SolidWorks Premium, SolidWorks Motion uses existing SolidWorks assembly information to build motion simulation studies. For example SolidWorks Motion will automatically map SolidWorks mates to derive motion joint conditions.
• Transfer loads seamlessly into SolidWorks Simulation to perform stress analysis - With the seamless transfer of loads from SolidWorks Motion to SolidWorks Simulation, you can visualize stress and displacements on a component at a single time instance or for the entire simulation cycle.
• Simulate real-world operating conditions - By combining physics-based motion with assembly information from SolidWorks, SolidWorks Motion can be used in a broad span of industry applications:
• Estimate peak motor torque when performing tasks like positioning antenna reflectors, opening and closing security gates, handling materials, and raising and lowering scissors-type lift tables. Also see how friction can increase power requirements and actuator size.
• Understand robotics performance during operation, for example, installing windshields, pick and place electronic components on circuit boards in electronics plants.
• Optimize or minimize the force imbalance of a rotating system in orbital sanders, sewing machines, shaker beds, drive-shafts, etc.
• Change the design length of backhoe linkages to provide better digging performance.
• Generate CAM curves (profiles) employed in automatic feed mechanisms and screw machines.
• Represent interactions between various gears (spurs, work, helical, and rack-and- pinion) used in different kinds of power transmission or motion control.
• Perform basic suspension tuning for racing applications.
• Associate physics-based models to engineering conditions - SolidWorks Motion offers several types of joint and force options to represent real-life operating conditions such as compound joints like hinge, screw, universal, input functions like step and harmonic, linear and non-linear springs, forces, moments, 2D and 3D contact to capture interaction between parts, etc.
• Interpret results with powerful and intuitive visualization tools Once you have completed the motion simulation run, SolidWorks Motion offers a variety of results visualization tools in the form of XY plots or numerical data of displacements, velocities, accelerations, force vectors at joint locations, displaying a trace on any point of the body during the entire simulation, check for colliding parts while the assembly moves, etc.
• Collaborate and share analysis results - SolidWorks Motion makes it easy to collaborate and share analysis results effectively with everyone involved in the product development process.
• Use SolidWorks Motion AVI, SolidWorks eDrawings or VRML formats to capture and communicate the physical motion to others.
• Generate graphs with numerical data in Microsoft Excel format in any coordinate system.
• Export graphs using a different reference frame (part).

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