CAD software aimed at students

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Sep 5, 2007

SolidWorks Education Edition 2007-2008 now includes CosmosWorks Advanced Professional and CosmosFloWorks Professional Edition analysis software.

SolidWorks has released SolidWorks Education Edition 2007-2008, with links to a new 3D CAD curriculum portal plus all the major features in SolidWorks 2007 Office Premium.

SolidWorks Education Edition 2007-2008 now includes CosmosWorks Advanced Professional and CosmosFloWorks Professional Edition analysis software, enabling students to perform all of the analysis tasks undertaken by a typical engineer designing products.

"Design and analysis are increasingly integrated functions in professional engineering jobs, and this coupling is important for those intent on designing better products", said Ashland Brown, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.

CosmosWorks Advanced Professional is a high-end finite element analysis (FEA) solution offering capabilities for nonlinear, dynamic and composite material analysis.

CosmosFloWorks Professional Edition can analyse compressible flow (liquid), solar radiation, rotating frame of reference and moving walls.

Bothtools will be useful for intermediate, advanced, and graduate-level students.

For example, students competing in Formula Student race car design and racing competitions can use these products to check the car frame's structural rigidity under different loading and material conditions.

The new curriculum portal includes resources for educators, including lessons, projects, exercises, answer keys, movies, white papers, PowerPoint presentations, and case studies as well as expanded course-specific curricula for design analysis.

Coursework is available in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Swedish, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Dutch.

The portal complements the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) weblog that SolidWorks launched last year, now offering more than 100 free lessons and receiving more than 10,000 visits per month.

Formerly on DVD, student guides are now available from the Design Library embedded in SolidWorks Education Edition 2007-2008.

This means students no longer have to find the disk and load guides onto their PCs.

SolidWorks Education Edition 2007-2008 includes an enhanced DWGeditor tool for editing existing 2D DWG/DXF drawings and learning 2D design techniques.

SolidWorks Corporation will supply three DWGeditor licenses for every licensed version of SolidWorks Education Edition.

SolidWorks Education Edition 2007-2008 is based on the commercial version of SolidWorks 2007 Office Premium.

"Enticing students toward engineering careers means showing them what they can do with 3D CAD software", said Marie Planchard, Director Of Worldwide Education Markets at SolidWorks Corporation.

"Giving them integrated design and analysis lets them see how projects they've worked on will behave in the real world".

"More importantly, it gives them a taste of how professionals work every day".

"That's a critical step in growing the global population of skilled engineers".

SolidWorks Education Edition 2007-2008 is available on Windows XP and Vista operating systems.