Simulation & FEA

Set up and solve a stress, frequency, buckling or thermal study by chat, read the results back, and drive a dimension toward a target — without leaving the chat panel or hunting through the solver's ribbon.

The short version

Describe the study the way you would to a colleague: what the part is made of, what is held, what pushes on it. CoPilot creates the study, assigns the material, applies the restraint and the load, meshes, solves, and reports the numbers.

Run a linear static stress analysis on this steel bracket: fix the minX face and apply 300 N in -Z on the maxX face. Report displacement and von Mises stress.

First, check what you have

Simulation depends on which solver is licensed and installed on your workstation, so it is worth thirty seconds to find out before planning around it.

Is simulation available here? List the solvers you can see and their status.

What simulation capabilities does this CAD system support?

What each CAD system provides

CAD system	Solver	Study types available
SOLIDWORKS	SOLIDWORKS Simulation Standard and Premium (native)	The full range, including nonlinear, dynamic, drop test, fatigue and topology with Premium
Autodesk Inventor	Inventor Stress Analysis (built in) and Autodesk Inventor Nastran	Linear static, frequency, buckling, thermal; the advanced types go through Nastran
Siemens NX	Simcenter structural analysis (linear static, modal) plus an NX Nastran deck export for an external solver	Linear static and modal natively; more through the deck-export bridge. Probe availability first — it depends on your NX configuration.
Solid Edge	Solid Edge Simulation (Femap / NX Nastran)	Linear static, frequency, thermal and buckling only. Nonlinear, dynamic, drop test, fatigue and topology are not exposed.

Two limits worth remembering: SOLIDWORKS Simulation cannot import external Nastran results — it solves its own studies. Solid Edge optimisation is single-variable goal seek only, and a running Solid Edge solve cannot be cancelled from chat.

Name faces by geometry, not by number

This is the difference between a repeatable study and a lottery. A face number belongs to the exact solid that produced it, so the same number can be a different physical face on a part that was rebuilt or modelled in a different order — and the study will run happily either way and give you a plausible wrong answer.

Use a geometric selector instead:

minX, maxX, minY, maxY, minZ, maxZ — the extreme face perpendicular to that axis
largest, smallest — by area

Each call reports which face it actually took, with its area, centre and normal. Read that back before solving:

Which face did the fixture land on? Give me its area and normal.

An area of 200 mm² on an 80 × 25 × 8 mm bracket tells you it took the 25 × 8 end face, which is what “the end” should mean.

For a cantilever, fix one extreme of the long axis and load the opposite one — check the bounding box first so you know which axis that is.

What is the bounding box? Then fix the face at the minimum of the longest axis.

Name the load direction too

“Downward” is not a defined quantity, and getting it wrong is expensive in a way that is hard to spot. On an 80 × 25 × 8 mm bracket, loading across the 8 mm thickness and loading across the 25 mm width differ by a factor of about ten in deflection — and both results look entirely reasonable on their own.

State an axis, or a direction relative to the loaded face:

+X, -X, +Y, -Y, +Z, -Z — explicit, always unambiguous
-normal — pushing into the loaded face, which is what you usually want for pressure
down, up — interpreted by the usual part convention (sketch on XY, extrude along +Z)

For ordinary bending, ask for the bounding box first and load across the smallest dimension.

What is the bounding box? Then fix the minX face and load 300 N in -Z on the maxX face.

Setting up a study

Study lifecycle

Create a linear static study called "Bracket load case 1"

List the studies in this document

Make "Bracket load case 2" the active study

Delete the study called "scratch"

Material

What materials are in the simulation library? Show me the aluminium alloys with their yield strength.

Assign 6061-T6 aluminium to the study

Material properties at the interface are SI: stresses in pascals, lengths in metres, masses in kilograms. You can still type in the units you think in — “270 MPa” is understood — but the numbers reported back follow the study's own convention, so read the units on the reply.

Restraints

Fixture types: Fixed, Pinned, Roller, on a flat face, on a cylindrical face, symmetry, and prescribed displacement.

Fix the minX face completely

Apply a pinned restraint to the bore — the cylindrical face

Apply symmetry on the minY face so I can model half the part

On Inventor, a prescribed displacement is not available in the built-in Stress Analysis branch — that study has to run through Inventor Nastran. Say so in your prompt if you need it.

Loads

Force (N, kN or lbf), pressure, torque, gravity, bearing load and temperature are all available. A force can be applied as a total, per unit area, or per selected entity.

Apply 2.5 kN total in -Z on the maxX face

Apply 0.4 MPa pressure into the top face

Apply a 40 Nm torque about the bore axis

Add gravity in -Z

Apply a 1200 N bearing load on the pin bore, pointing -Y

Set the whole part to 120 °C for the thermal study

Mesh

Leave it alone unless you have a reason. Omitted, the element size is derived from the part — the bounding-box diagonal divided by 25 — which is repeatable for a given solid, so two identical requests produce an identical mesh. A fixed default cannot be right for both a 2 mm part and a 2 m one, which is why an invented number is worse than none.

Element types: solid tetrahedral, solid hexahedral, mixed solid, shell, beam or mixed, with curved (high-order) elements on by default.

Mesh it at 2 mm and run the study again so I can compare

What is the mesh quality — element count, aspect ratios and any failed elements?

Comparing two mesh densities is a good convergence check: displacement should barely move, while peak stress at a clamped edge will shift by a few per cent because that is a stress concentration.

Solving

Solve the study and wait for it to finish

What is the status of the running study?

Cancel the solve

Reading results

What were the maximum displacement and the maximum von Mises stress?

What is the minimum factor of safety, and where is it?

What is the maximum strain?

What is the total reaction force at the fixture?

The reply tells you which source each number came from — the CAD system's own results browser, or the solved deck. That matters when the two disagree, which is itself informative.

Always compare against something independent. For a cantilever, tip deflection is PL³/3EI and peak bending stress is PLc/I. A model that disagrees with those by more than a few per cent is telling you the setup is wrong, not that the formula is. The reaction force is a second free check: it should equal the applied load.

Reports

Export the simulation results as a Word document to C:\reports\bracket.docx

Word, HTML, Markdown, CSV and PDF are rendered directly, with the metric table and any charts the solution produced. You can embed viewport images too — capture them first:

Set an isometric view, take a screenshot, then export the report to C:\reports\bracket.docx with that image included

There is also a “native” export that hands off to the CAD system's own report generator. On Inventor that is the Nastran Report Writer, which opens an interactive dialog and returns no file — so prefer the rendered formats unless you specifically want the native one.

Optimisation and design studies

CoPilot can drive dimensions toward a target — minimum mass at a stress limit, for example — rather than you running studies by hand.

Declare what may change.
Make the rib thickness a design variable between 4 and 12 mm, in 1 mm steps
Declare the limits.
Constrain the maximum von Mises stress to 180 MPa and the tip displacement to 0.5 mm
Declare the goal.
The objective is to minimise mass
Run it.
Run the design study over at most 15 iterations and show me the results table
Apply the winner — deliberately.
Apply the optimised dimensions to the model, then re-measure the mass and re-run the stress study to confirm

Search strategies available: AI-driven (the model proposes the next candidate from what it has seen), full factorial, Latin hypercube, gradient descent, NSGA-II for multi-objective problems, the CAD system's own design-of-experiments, and topology optimisation.

On Solid Edge, only single-variable goal seek is available. For a multi-variable design study use SOLIDWORKS Simulation or Inventor Nastran.

Other study types

Run a frequency study and give me the first five natural frequencies

Run a buckling study and report the load factor

Run a drop test from 1.2 m onto a rigid floor and report peak stress

Run a fatigue study for 10⁶ cycles at the current load and report the damage fraction

Run a topology optimisation targeting 40% mass reduction, preserving the two mounting pads, and export the result to C:\reports\bracket_topo.stl

Availability follows the table above — the advanced types need SOLIDWORKS Premium or Inventor Nastran.

The external Nastran bridge

Where the CAD system exports a deck rather than solving in place, the three steps are visible to you and can be driven separately:

Export the Nastran deck for this study to C:\fea\bracket.dat

Run the external Nastran solver on that deck

Import the results back into the study

This is also the route for handing a deck to a solver your organization already trusts.

What appears in your CAD system

Studies are built inside the CAD system's own simulation environment, so the analysis, node and element counts, the loads and restraints and the result sets all appear where you would expect, with mesh and load glyphs drawn in the viewport. Two Inventor caveats worth knowing:

The part must be saved to a file before it can be meshed properly. An unsaved part falls back to an approximation of its bounding box, which is roughly twice as stiff. If that happens the reply says so — do not ignore that note.
The analysis does not currently survive closing and reopening the part; the solver keeps its model alongside the file rather than inside it.

Before you rely on any of it

A stress number is the end of a chain of automatic choices — material, restraint, load, direction, mesh — and any one of them can be wrong while the result still looks credible. The checklist:

Read back which face each fixture and load landed on, with its area and normal.
Confirm the load direction was the axis you meant.
Check the reaction force equals the applied load.
Compare against a hand calculation for the nearest simple case.
Re-run at a different mesh size and see what moves.

Read Verifying results before a simulation figure informs a real decision. CoPilot is not certified for safety-critical, medical, aerospace-airworthiness or nuclear work, and you remain the engineer of record.